So, at least on PC, mods are a big part of the game. There are certain mods which are pretty much the standard on all servers of given types.
I’m speaking specifically of Pippi, but others come to mind as ubiquitous as well. As you all may or may not know, the developer for Pippi has recently announced that they will no longer support Pippi , they aren’t forwarding their code to anyone, and they aren’t coming back.
This has the potential to be an EPIC disaster for a lot of Conan Exiles players (roleplayers in particular) when 3.0 drops. Of course, everyone is excited about the 3.0 update, but also pretty certain that is going to break the roleplay servers and there will be no updates from the developer.
I’m not suggesting that funcom get in the business of aquiring a ton of small developers (and I’m not a developer), but I would think that the private server community is pretty crucial to the Conan Exiles ecosystem at this point. It might be wise to look at aquiring the more omnipresent apps and bring support for them in-house.
I’d bet private server owners would be willing to pay for applications with Pippi’s broad and crucial functionality.
Its been suggested about 5000000 times over the years. To answer your general question, has Funcom “ever considered”, I’m sure they have. Joshtech regularly chatted with them about various things. Same goes for any other mod besides Pippi.
The better question to ask is Joshtech willing to sell his code to Funcom. And that decision appears to be no. Its his code, he gets to decide what he wants to do with it. How it impacts everybody else is irrelevant to what Joshtech wants.
Furthermore, these types of threads don’t make mod creators feel supported. They really don’t. Quite the opposite, as its communicating that the people who use our mods have little care for what mod creators think about our own projects. And based on the ongoing toxic reaction to Joshtech quitting, it only reaffirms that.
So, I’m going to take the opportunity to once again remind people to support their mod creators. That might mean financially with donations, it might mean offering to volunteer to help with things (testing is a big one, being moderators on discords, offer to help with answering people’s questions on discord, offer to make stuff for them, etc), or it might be as simple as yelling back at trolls who attack us or just taking every opportunity feasible to thank us.
But Joshtech’s departure was about as big of a warning shot as there can be that the support for mod creators we currently have is a problem. And people need to take that warning seriously. Muting the thread before the avalanche of toxic attacks come flying at me, per usual.
We all know the risk when we use a mod, any mod, that it could go unsupported at a moment’s notice. If Funcom thinks something is core functionality for their game, they can add it at any time. If a server relies on a particular mod for its entire existence and that server owner didnt create or maintain that mod… well…
If I recall correctly Joshtech author of Pippi, was offered a job at FunCom
However he lives in Australia, and the timing was prohibitive because his significant other was from Norway and they had just spent a significant amount of money to assure that the S.O. could stay in Australia.
So he declined the offer because he didn’t want to relocate to Norway at that time.
There may have been other factors, but this is all I remember from conversations back then.
There’s also some legal factors to consider for something like this. A developer on another game forum explained it a few years back. I don’t remember the exact details, but suffice to say it all turns into a giant plate of copyright spaghetti written in legalese.