The Oculus Unity Pro Trial: should you take it?

Some days ago I opened my email and received a mail by Oculus saying that:

Since you’re one of our Rift pre-order pioneers, you get a free trial of Unity Pro! Your unique access code is available now, but expires December 31, 2016.

I was one of the one pre-ordering the Oculus Rift CV1 in January and living all the shipping mess (Pepperidge Farm Remembers!). So, now, Oculus rewards me with a free trial of Unity Pro! Cool! I’m a Unity Developer… this trial interests me a lot. But I’m not going to activate it.

But… why?? Yeah, maybe you wonder why. Reasons are:

• Nowadays Unity Free has lots of stuff that once was Pro-only. This means that with Unity Free you can already do lots of super-cool stuff, including VR. Oculus DK2 SDK couldn’t work with the Unity Free of the time, so you had to buy Unity Pro to officially use and develop for Oculus Rift (actually, poor people like me had to use a hack called OVRAgent). So a beta of Unity Pro was necessary to develop for DK2, while it is non-mandatory now.

  

• You can’t mix Unity Free and Pro projects. This means that if you use Unity Pro and a friend of yours use Unity Free, you can’t use Unity to develop the same project. This is a security measure of Unity Technologies to avoid companies to buy only a single Pro license and use that one to build all software developed by the Free licensed developers. So if you redeem the free Pro code, you can’t work with people having Unity Free in those trial months (maybe other people you usually work with have not a free trial too, and this can be a issue).
• When the Pro trial period ends, you automatically switch back to Free and you have to remove from your project all the Pro features you’ve introduced (otherwise it won’t build). And sometimes you can have strange behaviour in using that old Pro project with Free version and so you have to reset project settings and this kind of stuff. So, there can be nuisances in the downgrading process.

So, should you activate your free trial? As always, it depends. My advice is to activate it if:

• You just want to toy around with Unity Pro;
• You want to make some little demos with Unity Pro, publish them and then never modify them again;
• You want to buy Unity Pro at the end of the trial: this way, you’ll spare 4 months of licensing!

And you? What are you going to do with your free trial? Let me know… and don’t forget to share this article if you’ve found it useful!