Unigine Corp Tries To Lure Indie Game Developers

Unigine Corp has updated its advanced multi-platform game engine. The Russian-based company has also announced an initiative to try to pull in more indie game developers into using this game engine for future titles.

In an effort to try to lure indie game developers, Unigine Corp has announced an SDK licensing deal for indie game developers. Through the end of November, indie game developers can order the Unigine Engine SDK at greatly reduced prices.

Unigine Corp is offering an Indie SDK Starter for $1299 USD, a full multi-platform Indie SDK for $2995, or an Indie SDK for all PC platforms plus mobile targets for $3995. The mobile targets are Android with NVIDIA Tegra 2 graphics and Apple iOS. Unigine defines indie game companies as those with a turnover of less than $100,000 USD per year.

These prices may still be rather high to some indie game studios, but it's at a significant discount compared to normal Unigine licensing rates. Major studios wishing to take advantage of the Unigine Engine with source-code access are commonly paying around $30,000 USD per deal.

My only complaint about this Unigine Indie deal is that their "Indie SDK Starter" at $1,299 is only for Windows support -- no Linux (but Linux support is offered for the more expensive options). Now that's really sad! Unigine Engine is the most impressive Linux game engine available. With Rage / id Tech 5 not coming soon to Linux, it's easy to call Unigine the most impressive game engine with full Linux support. The OpenGL renderer is incredible as is the other features offered by this proprietary engine.

Last year there was the Unigine Linux game competition by Unigine Corp trying to spark indie interest in their game engine. Sadly, the three games that won are still not out yet. Unigine Corp is also still working on their OilRush game.

Unigine Corp announced the indie licensing deal this morning in a press release.

Unigine Corp has also mentioned some other Unigine Engine improvements via their development log. There's now binary SDKs for iOS and Android, support for XCode projects, GUI improvements, an ARM-optimized Ogg Theora library, and various other fixes/enhancements.