Not exactly free. I would like to learn from the pro version, but not at the price tag they charge:

http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses

I can learn from crippled free version, but eventually I'll be running into things stating "you need the pro version features for this, this, and that".

With UE4, $19 got me full engine to mess around with.

What is crippled about it? The company I work for literally builds games and we very rarely have to use any of the pro features.

The free version contains nearly everything you could ever realistically want to do. And some of the "pro" features can easily be written into the engine manually. The only hard and fast licensing requirement is the sub-100k revenue requirement. Up until then, Unity is about as free as it gets.

> The free version contains nearly everything you could ever realistically want to do.

Except publish to something other than desktop windows - or has that changed?

You can publish to OS X, iOS, Android and Windows Phone on the free license of Unity.

Major restrictions are no render to texture and a Unity splash screen on the app boot.

I suspect html5 will be supported in free Unity 5.0 (it is in the pro version currently in beta).

Good to know. Thanks!

This wasn't obvious from their site.

I'll give it a shot then and see what I can tinker with :)

That's far later. You might not even get there. Download it and start tinkering around if you're interested.

There is also a free 30-day trial. That should be long enough for you to realize if you want it or not.

$19/month for the SDK + 5% of your sales.

The subscription entitles you to updates, but you can cancel it and still have access to the SDK, it's tools and can also release yr game without an active subscription. The 5% is still applied, but you have to reach a certain sum of sales before it's incurred.

5% only applies after $3000 per month per title. Per Tim Sweeney himself.

https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/15056/need-some-c...