Mojang
Minecraft and Call of Duty community servers have been labelled as “illegal” by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) during a ‘Protect Our Games’ hearing.
One of the biggest movements in the gaming industry right now is Stop Killing Games, which has a focus on pushing live service games to keep providing the experience fans paid for, regardless of whether it shuts down or not.
As such, the movement has been calling for countless Senators, states, countries, and more to take action, prompting the ESA to host a hearing on the Protect Our Games Act – a proposed law designed to stop publishers from selling games that can later become completely unplayable when online support ends.
Well, during that hearing, the ESA has officially ruled Minecraft and Call of Duty community servers as “illegal.”
ESA says community servers are “illegal” during hearing
As shared by the Stop Killing Games YouTube channel, the hearing was discussing the “ability to go on a community server” in games.
“The author is stating that’s currently allowed right now,” explained one member of the hearing, to which another added, “that’s correct. Minecraft is currently hosted by community servers, Call of Duty, community servers, so it’s an option that is out there in existence.”
The discussion is primarily around how users will be able to continue playing a game should the developers shut it down, to which community servers hosted by players could be a key solution.
However, following the above statements, Gibbons jumped in to explain that “they’re illegal and 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,” continued Gibbons, to which the committee responded, “So is it like the black market of video games?”
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Gibbons then replied: “Yes. In fact, we consider it piracy. We have pending lawsuits against private servers right now, and the United States Trade Representative in their notorious markets reports on counterfeiting and piracy have named some of these big private servers as a notorious market.”
The comments quickly went viral, with tons of fans arguing against the statement and the Stop Killing Games movement vowing to implement other versions of the bill “in other state legislatures, and we are seriously looking at the federal level.”
As part of the Minecraft end-user licence agreement, it’s stated that “When you buy our games, that means you can download, install, and play them. For the server version of Minecraft: Java Edition, you can install it on a server and host online play,” meaning community servers are actively placed in their user terms.
