[bladedtoys]

I'm very glad of course but...

...technically all they did was lower the price by $19 a month.

...and bought a lot of press for that

...and a lot more shots at the 5% revenue.

It's really great of course. But better yet, it's really very clever.

[puranjay]

$19/month isn't much to you, but to a 15 year old tinkerer, or the 19 year old college freshman, it's good money.

Throughout its history, the best innovations in gaming have come from such people, the most recent being Palmer Luckey.

[daemin]

Unreal Engine was free for students since at least October last year (2014).

[benihana]

They did way more than that. They removed barriers to entry. Unreal becomes available for exploratory actions now. Before there was a $20 entrance fee just to try it out, now I can play with a project for free. You can use it for demonstrations or school projects now with basically zero risk to try it out.

[Detrus]

It was really $20 then $20 whenever you want to upgrade. And it's mainly for kids with gaming rigs. Good luck running any demos on Intel Integrated Graphics, much less the editor.

Unity can be used for free, with limits on certain features but good enough for school. Runs even on crappy $500 laptops.

[nacs]

As someone that has used both UE and Unity, Unity is far more restrictive in its free state (no soft shadows, forced Unity splash screen, no level of detail support, no inverse kinematics for animations, no profiler, and many more).

Also the Pro license for Unity is pretty expensive up front -- a few hundred for Pro and then another $100-200 for iPhone, another $200 for Android, etc and thats per month (or $4500 one-time payment for desktop + iOS/Android) regardless of how much you make with your game.

[Detrus]

I've built ok looking things in free Unity. One of the most irritating limitations was the ugly light gray theme instead of the darker gray theme.

Pro is $75 per month or $1500, then $75 per month for iPhone. And you can't just stop paying, it's a 12 month contract! If you pay up front then try to upgrade it's $700.

If they had an option to pay royalties and less up front it would be a much better proposition for upcoming indie devs. But they had some pricing thread where they asked the community after Unreal's $20+5% offering and decided it was best to keep current pricing. Perhaps the community felt that if you can't pony up a few K, don't crowd the market with your games?