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Comment by yohann305 | Hacker News Reader

It seems this news is a direct reply to yesterday's move from one of their competitors, Epic's Unreal Engine 4 announced to be free* to use.

link: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

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Ya, as far as pricing it now seems there is no debate. No rev share and only having to buy the pro edition if you exceed 100k in revenue makes Unity superior on the price imo. Of course there are other factors to consider depending on the project.

An aspiring indie with zero track record should choose based on the strengths of the tools themselves. Making $3000 in a quarter is a pipe dream, let alone 100k over any time scale.

Making $3000 in a quarter is a pipe dream?

Why do you say that? The indie game market is not all that crowded, if we're thinking about games like Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Sword and Sworcery (all of which did way better than $3000 a quarter). Gamasutra, the other day, was lamenting the fact that there aren't enough games in this space.

Assuming we're not talking about the very difficult mobile market (but just about high quality indies on the PC), why is it absurd to think that a small indie studio could be quite successful (even with a first game)?

Because most of them aren't? You're naming the hits, but it's a lot harder to remember the games that failed (or the ones that didn't even make it out of development).

Your observation is sort of predicated on the idea of a shipped game. Do you think there are mountains of shipped games in that market that made little or no money at all? I'm just not seeing that.

What I see is some incredibly successful indie games where the niche is so narrow you can't believe it made money at all (think of a brutal puzzler like AntiRoom, which was another very successful one).

I guess what I'm really asking here is what you think the barrier is, because it's not an incredibly crowded market. On mobile, just getting your game noticed is next to impossible. That's easier in this space. Or maybe you disagree?

Just check out the new releases list on Steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&...

I think my question probably seems overly naive or provocative (it's being down voted, after all). I'm really just trying to divine the source of your cynicism. Possibilities include:

1. There are too many games; it's as hard to get noticed in this sector as it is on the app store.

2. You don't stand a chance if you can't make a polished game, and a polished game is going to have a $100,000 budget (or let's just say, way more than "I think I'll download the free version of Unity" can afford).

3. Most games are mediocre at best, and yours probably will be too (because the designers of those hits really knew what they were doing, and you probably don't).

Am I getting this right? All of the above? Some of the above?

I've seen lots of indie games that I think are mediocre become hits. I've rarely seen a game that I think is a gem go completely unnoticed. Part of it, it seems to me, is that a really tight niche game can become a hit within that niche and make a surprising amount of money doing it.

Take "Battle of the Bulge" by Shenandoah (which is an iOS game). $20,000 ask on Kickstarter for a game that is going after people who are into hex wargames. I'm going to guess that that game did considerably better than $3000 a quarter. They're making more, after all.

Similarly, there are people out there who love side-scrollers and will basically buy any side-scroller that looks even remotely good. If it is good, is it really going to be a financial bust?

It's some of all of them, but it's mostly #1. There's a big indie gaming glut. Every week Steam gets more new games than I can watch the trailers for, much less buy and play. And those are the games that manage to make it through Steam's (admittedly far less selective than it once was) admissions process. Like squeaky-clean says, check out Greenlight some time. Even if all of the games on Greenlight were good (they're not), who the heck has time for all of them?

hex wargames are: 1) not so small of a niche 2) a great marketing decision - just like space sim, this genre has amazing potential revenue per customer. That's proven empirically, as for a reason - I would hypothesize that main market for that sort of thing are nostalgic middle-aged tech specialists, which is a market with amazing "size * disposable_income" potential. That doesn't only make the whole pie larger, but also drives AAC (allowable acquisition cost) up, which makes marketing so much easier.

Instead of checking Steam's latest releases, which are the games lucky enough to actually get onto Steam, check other markets, like Desura[0] or Steam Greenlight[1]. There is an overwhelming amount of indie games, most of them mediocre at best. You only remember the very few polished games.

[0] http://www.desura.com/games/browse/?filter=t&kw=Search+...&s...

[1] http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=765&browses...

I doubt 1% of games that are started on these engines are finished, let alone sold.

That is why you won't make $3000, because you won't make $10.

> Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Sword and Sworcery

All of which cost at least $100k to make.

What about version control? I remember you had to have Unity Pro in order to be able to use version control with other people in a sane manner.

You can set up your own version control via command line. There are tutorials on how to do this and what files types to ignore, etc. You just can't have it integrate into the actual editor... which as programmer is fine by me.

Looks like that's still a premium feature, but you can get it standalone for $20/m instead of paying the full $75/m for Pro Edition.

"Team Licence" http://unity3d.com/get-unity

It's super trivial now to set up your own version control at the command line. One check box in editor preferences and I was up and running with my own private free mercurial repos on Bitbucket.

I remember this being the biggest pain in the ass with unity, so much so that I did want to use it for team development, so this is huge if they solved it.

Do you happen to have a link to which setting to switch?

Here you go!

"This is done by selecting Edit->Project Settings->Editor in the application menu and enabling External Version Control support by selecting Visible Meta Files in the dropdown for Version Control. This will show a text file for every asset in the Assets directory containing the necessary bookkeeping information required by Unity. The files will have a .meta file extension with the first part being the full file name of the asset it is associated with. Moving and renaming assets within Unity should also update the relevant .meta files. However, if you move or rename assets from an external tool, make sure to syncronize the relevant .meta files as well."

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ExternalVersionControlSystemS...

Unity has been free for at least a year but they didn't seem to advertise it until until Epic made their announcement.

Free version was pretty limited until this release.

Now free version is fully featured and pro version just has some team features and lack of revenue restrictions.

Now you can deploy to iPhone and Android without paying $150/month.

You could before too. You would get the Unity splashscreen at the start, but you could deploy to any platform from the free version.

is the splash removed in Unity 5 free?

Nope, it looks like it's there,looking at the list of features:

http://unity3d.com/get-unity

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