Unity subscription prices to rise in 2020
Unity Technologies has announced the the price of Plus and Pro subscriptions to its Unity game engine will rise on 1 January 2020, from $35/seat/month and $125/seat/month to $40/seat/month and $150/seat/month.
The price rise applies only to new sales, so anyone with an an existing subscription will be unaffected unless they buy more seats. Free Unity Personal subscriptions remain unchanged.
Cost of new Plus subscriptions to rise 14% next year; Pro subscriptions up 20%
Unity is currently available free to users with revenues under $100,000/year, although free Personal accounts add a non-editable Unity splash screen to every project.
For professional work, paid subscriptions make it possible to remove or edit the splash screen.
Plus accounts currently cost $35/seat/month, and are available to anyone with revenues under $200,000/year; Pro accounts cost $125/seat/month, and add priority support plus a range of extra services.
Those prices will now rise to $40/seat/month and $150/seat/month on 1 January 2020.
Unity Technologies’ explanation of the price rise is partly just that it hasn’t changed its pricing since discontinuing perpetual licences in favour of subscriptions in 2016.
However, for users in many countries, including the US, the price rises are higher than the rate of inflation, representing a 14% increase in the cost of Plus subscriptions and 20% increase for Pro subscriptions.
In its blog post, Unity Technologies also cites improvements in Unity since subscriptions were introduced.
“We’ve invested across all dimensions of the product such as building new features and services, improving the quality of releases, widening our platform reach, and adding premium learning resources,” it commented.
No price change for existing subscriptions
Existing users will also be unaffected by the price increases unless they buy more seats of Unity or renew expiring custom subscription agreements: the new rates apply only to new subscriptions.
Unity Technologies says that it does not guarantee that pricing for current subscribers will never rise, but that there are “currently no plans to increase prices beyond this announcement”.
In the section of its FAQs devoted to whether subscription prices will be raised regularly in future, the firm simply says that “we periodically review pricing and consider making adjustments”.
Early user feedback philosophical, if not overly enthusiastic
If the comments on Unity’s blog post are representative, users are fairly philosophical about the price rise.
Several favourably compare the cost of Unity subscriptions to the cost of using its principal competitor, Unreal Engine, for commercial games: currently 5% of gross royalties beyond the first $3,000/quarter.
Of the dissenting voices, many simply boil down to ‘any price rise would be unwelcome’, although some also criticise the stability of recent LTS releases.
Read Unity Technologies’ online FAQs of the new pricing for Unity Plus and Pro subscriptions