Unity 3D Indie now free

Unity

In a really great move, the makers of the Unity game package have released the newest version of the engine (2.6) for free. The Indie version, which until now had a price tag of $ 200, is now free for both commercial and non-commercial games, unless the company making it is not making more than $ 100.000 per year. In this case, one has to buy the Unity Pro package, which also has some advanced features.

This announcement is actually pretty funny since some days I ago I was hovering over the button to actually buy the indie version. I only have some small gripes with Unity, for example that it’s not possible to link to the engine directly from C++ or embed it in a normal application, e.g. to build an editor. On the other hand, especially with the move of going free, I guess Unity will see some more growth with lots of people using it, and the Unity plugin seems to me to be the best bet for a competitor for Flash in the 3D web games area.

Also interesting is the announcement to work on a XBox 360 version of Unity, after already supplying Nintendo Wii and iPhone versions, with the latter being used in some top selling iPhone games.

I will now definitely add a Unity game to my list of planned projects!