Player Run Minecraft Servers are “Piracy”, ESA Says

As next generation consoles go digital only, the ESA is arguing that player run servers are “piracy”.

The Stop Killing Games movement is moving ahead with efforts to make the gaming industry more consumer friendly.

The movement originally took off when Ubisoft announced that they would be shutting down the game, The Crew. The Crew was an online live service game and the company decided to no longer support it. In shutting down the game, the company would also bar everyone from ever playing the game ever again. Even then, this was a long standing concern for gamers and people who want to preserve video games. Once the servers shut down, there is no way to play the game at all. So, the movement argues that if the developer wanted to shut down their servers, there should be a way to play the game in offline mode or files would get distributed to help the community run their own servers.

The industry pushed back, arguing that there shouldn’t be any obligation by companies to do so. Once the business decided to stop officially supporting the game, that was the final decision for everyone and anyone who legally payed money should be out of luck. Thanks to the pressure from Stop Killing Games, The Crew got a second life as the developers worked in an offline mode, preventing the game from being nuked out of existence. While it was a victory, it was a small one as many other developers are pushing for this planned obsolesce. So, the movement turned to the political arena and pushed for legislation in multiple jurisdictions to ensure that there is a way for players to continue playing once the developer decides to no longer support their life service game.

One of those legislative pushes is AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act. During a hearing on this, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) made a baffling comment. They argued that player run or community run online servers are “piracy”, going so far as to single out games like Call of Duty and Minecraft as examples of this “piracy”. From PCGamer:

The representative in question was Jennifer Gibbons, the ESA’s vice president for state government affairs, and just to clear this up right away: what she said was nonsense. You can, literally right now, head over to the official Minecraft website and download a .jar file to let you run your own private server.

Gibbons was responding to a comment made by California state assemblymember Chris Ward—who introduced the bill—regarding the possibility of keeping games alive with private servers. “Minecraft is currently hosted by community servers, Call of Duty [has] community servers, so it’s an option that is out there, in existence here today.”

Gibbons cut in: “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”

Asked by California state senator Caroline Menjivar as to whether this was “like the black market of videogames?” Gibbons responded “Yes. In fact, we consider it piracy. We have lawsuits, two pending lawsuits, against private servers right now, and the United States Trade Representative (USTR) in their Notorious Markets Reports on counterfeiting and piracy has named some of these big private servers as a notorious market.” A notorious market refers to a market where intellectual property infringement is rife—think something like The Pirate Bay.

It’s an absolutely bonkers argument. If these community run servers were somehow “illegal” and against the wishes of Microsoft, then why is Microsoft giving anyone the tools for people to run their own community server in the first place? It makes precisely zero sense. Like, “yeah, we are giving you these cool tools, but don’t in any way use them.”

I think Microsoft knows what they are doing here. They aren’t accidentally releasing these tools and allowing people to commit acts of “piracy”. They actively encourage people to do this because they know it strengthens the position of the game in the marketplace. It’s why large platforms (save for the badly run platform of “X”) give API access out. Others can embed content on their own websites, encouraging users to continue to use the platform’s services. To make it clear, Microsoft is actively doing this and permitting people to run their own servers.

Of course, for the corporations, the broader play is to further crack down on consumer rights. It was only the other day I was noting that next generation consoles are looking to be digital only. This as the corporations push consumers out of owning physical copies of games. Such a move only further weakens consumer rights as it opens the door for more abusive market practices where corporations delete legal “purchases” once contracts or agreements expire or fall through. This ensures that consumers lose the products that they pay for regardless of actual functionality.

If anything, these arguments for the ESA is actually a great argument for straight up copyright infringement on the part of the consumer. As so many online say, “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing”. Indeed, if you can’t legally purchase the content, then what lost sales are there in the first place? If someone downloads a game that cannot be bought and is no longer supported, then what financial complaint can the company make in the first place? After all, the company moved on, so that whole chapter is behind that company, done, dusted, and forgotten about.

At any rate, arguments like the ones by the ESA make absolutely no actual sense. It’s a veiled attempt to ensure that consumers keep buying new stuff and then telling consumers when they can no longer enjoy something they legally paid for. It really only shows why some basic level consumer protections were justified in the first place.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.