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Comment by metalforever | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I don’t want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that I’m barely making any money on. My games aren’t ever going to gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity Plus if it’s a side thing for them also (I recall there being a 100k cap).

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Well, it's worth noting Unity doesn't have royalties - you just pay per seat on a monthly cost, and it's free indefinitely* if you make/raise less than $100k a year.

* (this also means no official support and a few missing features, not sure if UE4 offers everything for free)

It is unclear whether you have to pay the monthly fee if you don’t have a registered business and are working on something in your free time, and have a day job making 100k+. I don’t like how the motivations are out of whack here . Unity makes more money if I don’t finish my game .

Your question is answered pretty clearly by the license terms: https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-of-service/software

> if you are an individual using the Unity Software, but not providing services to a third party, your Total Finances are the amount generated in connection with your use of the Unity Software. In this case, your Total Finances would not include amounts you generate from other work (for example, if your day job is as a zookeeper).

UE offers everything free and now they started providing some in game services (such as accounts, statistics) for free too. Only way to pay to use Unreal Engine is to earn more than 1.000.000 usd which for most people means everything is completely free. I’d say unreal has a much better value proposition in here.

i know games with $3 million dollar budgets that chose Unity over Unreal because with Unreal that would have cost them $150k where as with their 10 person team Unity cost them $45k for 3 years.

It may have changed, but back when we were looking into Engines to use, Unity had a completely free license until you hit $100,00 in sales or wanted to remove the unity splash screen on app launch which costed a then flat $1500 licensing fee for the "Professional Edition".

Removing the splash screen for Unity is a feature - Unity has a pretty bad rep (perhaps undeservedly) because so much shovelware uses the engine.

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