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Comment by leobelle | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to try Unity, but it is just so incredibly expensive. $1,500 bare bones, and more if you want pro add ons.

If you just want to try it's free: http://unity3d.com/pages/create-games?gclid=CNn4_OHL07wCFSYO...

And $1500 is not expensive for a game engine, or really any type of professional content creation tool.

To expand on this, the free version is very capable and doesn't restrict the ability to publish your game. If you're an independent developer it's unlikely that you'll find yourself constrained.

Nitpick: an individual or entity with $100,000 in revenue per year cannot publish using the free version. Per their license[1], it does not matter where the revenue comes from. There is probably some sort of legal gymnastics you can perform to get around this, and one could argue that if you have $100k in revenue you shouldn't be worrying about a $1500 one-time purchase, but it is a limitation.

[1] http://unity3d.com/company/legal/eula

Just to add to what mminer said:

The free version is very capable and unless you make more than $100K dollars with it, you don't have to pay.

"Unity Free, which include the free platform add-on products, may not be licensed or used by a commercial entity with annual gross revenues (based on prior fiscal year) in excess of US$100,000, or by an educational, academic, non-profit or government entity with a total annual budget for the entire entity (based on prior fiscal year) in excess of US$100,000."

http://unity3d.com/company/legal/eula

There are a lot of free alternatives; monogame is nice, http://www.godotengine.org/wp/ is recent and there is a lot more. Unity is very popular and nice, but if you want to try/play around/make simple games there are alternatives enough.

MonoGame is a very good choice if you wan't to built a game from scratch as opposed to scripting a bunch of pre-made modules:

http://monogame.net https://github.com/mono/MonoGame

http://Libgdx.com will do that for Java; also free.

I've been casually exploring Godot Engine for the last few days, and I have to say it's got everything I personally need in a 2d engine as a beginner game developer. I feel like someone with more experience/knowledge may find it limiting, but for me it's actually allowed me to do more with less, whereas frameworks like XNA always left me trying to figure a lot out for myself and write a lot of code that seemed unnecessary/redundant.

Sure, GDScript is poorly documented and isn't really python, but it's not that hard to find the undocumented features (search the github code), and the fact that it compiles to pretty much any platform means it's a rather small mental investment for a large gain in deployability.

And you can extend everything with native objects. So yeah, i am, like you, quite happy with it.

How do you figure? They have a free version that lets you publish for web, desktop, and mobile with some restrictions on available feature set.

The price is not expensive for what professional developers tend to pay for their tooling.

Just try to imagine how much money you would need to charge for software to be able to live from it and pay all running expenses.

I just would like that they settle their issues with Xamarin and update they .NET runtime to a more modern one.

I presume the issues are licence costs for a new runtime ?

I don't know exactly what the issue might be, just read in some online forums that they still use the runtime from Novell days.

You can get a free account on http://playcanvas.com/. It's got a lot of similarities to Unity but runs in the browser.

[I'm one of the founders]

He might be a C# developer. There is quite a quality difference between languages.

Boooo!

I don't think it's hard to argue that C# as a game development language is much more mature than HTML5.

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