Installing Unity with Unity Hub

To create games with Unity, you need to install Unity itself. Unfortunately, you must navigate a maze of options before you can even press the download button. These options are pretty much determined by what you need, and more importantly, how much money your company makes.

Unity is not a free engine, nor can you buy it outright. This was not always the case. In the old days, you paid for each version of the software. That changed around the time of Unity 5. Now, if your games make enough money, you need to purchase a subscription. This means that you can always use the latest version of the engine, but eventually – if your games are successful enough – you’ll have to pay for it.

Note: This tutorial is part of a collection that teaches Unity development from the ground up. You can read the entire series over here. This series is free and does not require any account creation. All assets are provided. If you find it useful, feel free to buy me a coffee.

Different Unity versions

There are three different main tiers: Personal, Plus, and Pro. Most folks start with the Personal tier and as your games acquire revenue, you’ll “level up” to the higher tiers.

The Personal Edition is the starter tier. Chances are, you are an indie developer who makes less than 200k per year. If this is you, congratulations! You can use the free version of Unity. This version contains all the core features. This is a great way to learn the program and while you won’t have access to some features or services, this is a great way to get started with Unity.

The Pro Edition is for game developers and companies that exceed the 200k per year revenue threshold. This gives you Unity as well as a few other services. This tier costs 2k per seat per year.

In an ideal world, you start with the Personal edition to learn the basics and grind out games. Once you are making enough money, you’ll “level up” to the Pro edition. Everyone benefits.

You may have heard about a “runtime” fee. This fee was based on the game usage numbers. After immense backlash, Unity cancelled the runtime fee.

This article series is written using the Personal edition.

Creating a Unity account

To get started, head on over to unity.com. It’s time to create your Unity account. Click the profile image in the upper right-hand corner, and then click the Create a Unity ID link.

This page changes a lot so it may look different by the time you are reading this. Once you click that link, you’ll be brought to a registration form.

Once you filled out the registration form and jumped through some “I’m not a robot” hoops, you will have a bonafide Unity account.

At this point, you would think you can install Unity. But no. You cannot. You need to install a program that is used to install Unity. And that program is … Unity Hub

Understanding Unity Hub

If you are new to Unity and development in general, the idea of a dedicated installer seems silly. This isn’t a tool used for marketing or upselling new features. It’s actually a way to manage multiple versions of Unity on the same computer.

Unity changes a lot and code that works in one version may not work the same way in a different version. In practice, changing engine versions can be a risky enterprise.

Here’s an example, imagine you created a well-received game using version 2018.2.5. You discover that the community discovered an exploit and has requested a fix. You haven’t touched that project in over five years and lots have changed with Unity since then. Opening the project in the current Unity version is out of the question. Unity will first update the project to the current version, possibly breaking things. The code that worked five years ago will need to be retested and fixed. It could take months to do all of this.

Instead, you go to Unity Hub, download the old engine version, and open your project. This old version doesn’t interfere with any of the current versions installed on your system. You’re able to find the bug, make the change, and release the updated game.

That’s pretty awesome!

Installing the Unity Editor

Now, comes the fun part – installing Unity! Typically, you can find a download link on the Unity homepage, but you can skip all that searching and click the following link:

https://unity.com/download

Scroll down the page and you’ll see a bunch of options for downloading Unity Hub for different platforms. This series is written on a macOS so things may look a tad different on Windows (or Linux).

Once you download the file, run the installer. This will walk you through the steps of installing Unity Hub. Once you go through the installation process, launch the program. You can find it listed in your applications under Unity Hub.

Where to go from here

At this point, you have installed Unity and now have a good idea about Unity Hub. Now, comes the fun part – installing your code editor. For this series, you’re going to be using either Visual Studio Community or Visual Studio Code. You’ll learn how to install them in the next tutorial.