Unity goes free – developers rejoice

Unity, the creator of the Unity engine for browser-based and iPhone games, has just announced that its game development platform will now be free.

According to Venturebeat, the Unity platform which previously sold for $199 will now be available for free to developers which generate less than $100,000 a year in revenue from games based on those tools.

It’s interesting that this announcement at the annual Unite conference in San Francisco, follows the investment of $5.5 million in Unity by Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful VCs in Silicon Valley.

My only quibble is that it’s usually much simpler to have a product entirely free, with a premium option, rather than imposing a revenue threshold. If Unity wants to make its web gaming platform as ubiquitous as Flash, I think they should give the basic dev tools away to everyone for free, no matter how big there are, and monetize through the premium options.

But meanwhile, anyone wanting to develop web-based games can rejoice.