During a senate hearing in California, community game servers for games like Minecraft and Call of Duty were called “illegal” by the Entertainment Software Association. The claim comes despite games like Minecraft directly providing tools to players to run their own servers.
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The claim from the ESA arrived during a California Senate hearing regarding the Protect Our Games act. California State Assemblymember Chris Ward introduced the bill to the floor, and touched on how running private servers could help to keep games alive after official developer or publisher support comes to an end. When pointing to Minecraft and Call of Duty as examples of games that already have community servers, he was interrupted by the ESA’s Vice President for State Government Affairs Jennifer Gibbons, who called them “illegal.” She went on to indicate that the aforementioned servers aren’t affiliated with Microsoft, don’t employ the same safety standards, and that the ESA considers these servers to be piracy. She further pointed to two pending lawsuits against private servers, and noted that the United States Trade Representative labeled “some of these big private servers as a notorious market.”
Source: PC Gamer