The “Stop Killing Games” movement initiated by players has continued to promote legislation in recent years, hoping that game companies will still provide offline modes or private servers to allow players to continue playing after they stop operating online games. However, this sport has suffered another setback recently in California, USA. The “Protect Our Games Act” bill failed to pass committee review. What caused even more controversy was that the American Entertainment Software Association (ESA) made a speech at the hearing that directly caused the entire gaming circle to explode.
ESA Vice President of Government Affairs Jennifer Gibbons said in response to questions from members of parliament that community private servers set up by players such as “Minecraft” are essentially illegal because they are not authorized by Microsoft, and even compared such private servers to “piracy.”
Players are all dumbfounded: Doesn’t the official provide installation tools themselves?
The reason why this statement has caused a lot of questions is that the official “Minecraft” has been providing players to download server programs for many years, and setting up your own multiplayer world has long been one of the important cultures of the Java version. And therefore many players immediately asked, if private servers are really illegal, then how to explain the tools provided by the official over the years?
ESA later added to the media that according to current laws, private servers may indeed involve the intellectual property rights of game companies, and publishers just choose whether to exercise this right. In other words, this does not mean that all private servers will be held accountable, but legally, game companies still retain the right to take action.
This is exactly what we want to change!
Regarding ESA’s statement, “Stop Killing Games” believes that this just proves that there are problems with the current law. The movement hopes to promote legislation that requires game companies to provide official tools or legal methods to allow players to maintain community servers themselves after they stop operating online games, so as to prevent the game from completely disappearing due to official closure of the server. However, California’s “Protect Our Games Act” failed to pass smoothly this time, which also means that relevant reforms still have a long way to go.
After the news was exposed, communities such as Reddit also sparked heated discussions. Many players believe that if even the private servers of “Minecraft” can be defined as illegal, then the preservation methods of many classic online games may be challenged in the future.
One sentence scared the entire gaming community
“Minecraft” has been popular for more than ten years, and community servers have always been an indispensable part. Nowadays, the sentence “Private servers are illegal” not only makes players full of questions, but also makes the “Stop Killing Games” movement once again become the focus. It can only be said that players were originally worried about the game being shut down; now they are even more worried about whether even the servers they set up will one day become a legal issue.