Is the modding community not offering enough for you? Just wondering, as it seems quite unusual for such a big hit to have modding encouraged the way minecraft does. (I know that part of this is due to Mojang being an indie studio). Other big studio with big selling franchise are barely having what would be considered as passable ten years ago (yes I am talking about the omni present call of duty x): no dedicated server and no modding capability.
I am more concerned about minecraft being still running on the JVM and being such a slow cow running on a half decent modern hardware when C++ is still the main language for written game engine. You would have thought that in 4 years, a new iteration of the game optimized for rendering and speed would have been made available.
/off-topic
Back on topic, I think Notch is taking this too much at heart and should just ask Mojang to put a huge notice exonerating themselves from private server charging their customers.
Essentially, the only reason there is a modding community for Minecraft is because it's Java-based and people can just decompile the shipped code and hack stuff onto it.
So you have the modding community adding value for free, while Mojang sells the game and takes the profits, but doesn't seem to be investing it back.
See, deep down, this is what bothers me about it. They haven't even added a decent questing system but modders have, and Notch gets the cash while articles like this prevent anyone from really making any money at it.
I don't know if that is the only reason. I mean Quake had quite a good set of mods pretty much written in C++ type of code. More recently you can find modded server for games using Python or LUA for their game logic, official or not.
I am more concerned about minecraft being still running on the JVM and being such a slow cow running on a half decent modern hardware when C++ is still the main language for written game engine. You would have thought that in 4 years, a new iteration of the game optimized for rendering and speed would have been made available.
/off-topic
Back on topic, I think Notch is taking this too much at heart and should just ask Mojang to put a huge notice exonerating themselves from private server charging their customers.