VS pricing page:
For standard subs (non-cloud based), it appears that through MS Store a PRO license is $1,199 per user per (first) year + $799 renewal cost per user per yr. Enterprise (which larger companies I’ve been at have had) is $5,999 first yr + $2,569 annually after.
Imagine you work for a small engineering contractor (lots of these types of companies all over the world) w/ 25-30 employees. Based on those numbers, Pro license would cost over $30k first yr + $20k annually after and Enterprise would be over $150k first yr + $65k annually after. This is a difficult pitch for a shop where people like to dev on Windows, Mac & Linux and people are already sold on Unity.
Can’t use VS community b.c. we make over a million in revenue (revenue != spare cash to blow on whatever tools you want), but w/ 25-30 engineers’ salaries to pay, the company’s spare cash-flow is not enough to justify buying a VS sub for $20-30k annually for your engineers.
I’m pushing to start using Unreal for internal projects to spare us the Unity up-front license costs (and my own interest in UE4 :P), but it doesn’t make sense asking people to introduce another technology into our environment unless there’s some financial or technical incentive. The VS license cost significantly hurts my pitch - plus, the fact that we (and our clients) work on Windows, Mac & Linux boxes (mostly Linux) by necessity. It doesn’t make sense to drop thousands of dollars on VS as an IDE when it only runs on Windows and it adds yet another tool to our already insanely large library of tools that people need to keep up with.
I can also tell you we’re not the only tech / engineering company in this position - I know others that would benefit too. I’m only reaching out b.c. this is a really crappy reason (IDE support) not to be able to use UE4 (which I’m loving so far in my personal use) for simulation / VR projects at work.