Update: Unity 4.7.2 is now available http://unity3d.com/get-unity/download/archive

We are happy to ship the final version of 4.6, which is now called 4.7.0 . This is the rollup of all previous patches 4.6.9p1 to 4.6.9p4 and therefore doesn’t have any new features. This is going to be the last and final official release for 4.x as mentioned in the previous post about Unity Patch Release Plan . The only difference is that we now call it 4.7.0 instead of 4.6.10 as we originally wrote.

We would like to explain the reasons for going with 4.7.0 and would like to emphasize the fact that this should not be considered as an indication of continuation of 4.x series. The following are the main reasons, among others, why we decided to call it 4.7.0.

As you are all aware, the Unity webplayer plugin uses the version number to determine which web player runtime to download to play back content and the old plugins will not recognize the new version number (x.x.10). As it’s not possible to update both the browser plugin part and the Unity runtime part at the same time, we have to stick to the version format that the webplayer plugin is able to understand. The other problem in going with 4.6.10 is that the version is exposed to the scripting API (Application.unityVersion). We cannot guarantee that all the existing and 3rd party code would handle the “x.x.10” format properly.

In summary, switching to a new version string format that is different from all the previous versions before (4.6.10) as literally the last release in Unity 4.x series is an avoidable risk for all and hence we are using the version number 4.7.0.

This marks the end of a three year cycle of 4.x and a full year of 4.6.x releases. We take this opportunity to thank everyone for being a part of this journey! It has been quite intense with 10 public and 36 patch releases for 4.6 in the last year. We now want to focus our energy on maintaining and developing Unity 5.

To find out what’s in the latest Unity 5 release (Unity 5.3) check out the release blog post. You can read about Facepunch Studio’s experience of porting Rust to Unity 5 here, and if you are planning to move to Unity 5, you’ll find these porting guidelines useful.