The new Unity engine, Unity 5, is out now and, while it won’t be getting any flashy headlines about being “free”, it’s still priced more aggressively than Epic’s Unreal engine and will likely remain the cheaper alternative to Unreal for most developers. It also comes with a nice tech demo video.
With their latest demo video, Unity Technologies are showing just how much more advanced Unity 5 is than previous generation of the engine. The lighting and animation are easily comparable to those of blockbuster games on Unreal and Frostbite. Whether teams working outside of Unity Technologies can wring that much performance from the engine remains to be seen, of course.
Still, the big news is that Unity 5 is still offering a better deal to a lot of smaller developers. The engine license is available for just $1500, or $75 a month, which is likely to be cheaper than the 5% royalty developers would owe on their gross revenue if they used the “free” Unreal Engine 4.
There’s also the personal edition, which is not as feature-rich as Pro, but has the benefit of being, well, free.