koobas.hobune.stream
Unity Free license for ios game distribution
Hello all, I am currently looking into using Unity Free (I have version 3.5) with the IOS exporter to develop a learning game for an academic project. The game will be free for users to download and use and there is no commercial purpose (it's a Uni project and I don't intend to sell it).
However in order for me to have it play-tested and evaluated by users I will have to put it on the Apple Store, so people can access it. My question is whether I can use the free version for this purpose, as student budgets are quite limited so paying for a license of any kind (PRO or IOS) would be very difficult even with the student discounts. Is there any hidden costs that may come up along the way, apart from the $99 developer fee? Can I fully develop and freely distribute the game to users without a paid license?
Any advise would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
I would think so since the Pro version is required if you have a turnover of more than $100 000 in the previous year. So I doubt you made that last year. You are even allowed to sell and generates benefits as long as you do not pass that threshold, then you need to buy the license.
You mention you are a Uni so make sure you do not use your school licenses to develop as they are probably watermarked with the seal of educational license and that is illegal to sell this kind of product. That goes also for the modeling except if you use Blender (open source).
Since you only want to publish your game for testing and evaluation purpose you can also build a web version and host it online. That way testers can easily access the game online and give you feedback. On way of establishing this is dropbox. Build the game into the public folder and share the link to the html page.
Isn't "iOS exporter" just another name for the $400 iOS license?
"However in order for me to have it play-tested and evaluated by users I will have to put it on the Apple Store, so people can access it" this is completely wrong. You just use testflightapp.com in that situation.
To publish to iOS you need the Unity iOS Add-on. For a few weeks in 2012 this was completely free, however the regular price is $400. Registered students can obtain educational copies of Unity from a re-seller called Studica in certain parts of the world, see studica.com. Am sure you can convince your professor that spending small amounts of money on Unity is a good investment. (And considerable cheaper than the price of the Mac, and the various iOS devices you'll need in order to test the application.)
