ESA bafflingly declares private Minecraft servers 'illegal'

What's the point in Microsoft shooting against "their own" product? I mean, the option for public or private servers is literally built into the game. Also there is the option for playing together over LAN which you could also argue is a private server.

Use DDG and turn the AI off.

AI is always useless.

If you have the facts, you pound the facts. If you have the law, you pound the law. If you have neither, you pound the table. This is the ESA pounding the table, and the goal is to confuse the gerontocracy LARPing as lawmakers.

And they've been successful with that strategy (for now)

Regardless, the Protect Our Games Act did not make it out of this stage of the legislative process. With four aye votes, three noes, and four abstentions, it failed to accrue the majority of ayes necessary to pass. Nevertheless, it has been granted a reconsideration, so it's not the end.

The way I see it there are two possible reasons:

1. incompetence: The statement in question was said by ESA's vice president for state government affairs, in other words a professional lobbyist. Video games are her day job, not her hobby. I don't know how much she actually plays herself. It may therefore be the case that she wasn't briefed properly or she got confused. The ESA is currently persuing legal action against certain private servers after all. The article contains specifics on those but in short: Those servers enable piracy, the Minecraft ones don't.
2. they are lying: the whole thing was part of a hearing on Stop Killing Games. Private servers are one of the ways to fulfill their demands. It is the industry's position that implementing those is too complicated. Each instance of private servers existing weakens the argument. So better pretend that those don't exist. After all gamers won't even learn about this statement. It's a random California state senate hearing. They don't watch those!

No, that was after the home taping killed it.
It is like Schrodinger's Cat. Both alive and be killed by anything.

McDonald's getting killed by home cooked burgers.
AI is being killed by local models also. So many things are killing so many things!

F*cking typos!

I lied tho I actually did award you points hehe

So absolutely no one I respect. Nice. ESA go fuck yourself.

This is why tech has gotten so out of control in the US. In the past 40 years, this industry has had so many revolutionary inventions while our legislators on average get older and less likely to understand the newest technology, thereby making them more susceptible to being misled or misleading others. Combined with our legislators not giving a fuck about actual economics, this is how we have oligopolies everywhere in the US with cartel behavior

My thoughts leaned more towards the World of Warcraft private servers; in many ways it's the same respect, filling in a role that has been taken by the publisher, but they perhaps didn't intend it to appear so inflammatory in Minecraft's case, since the main purpose of those servers is just for gameplay, not DRM.

It's still a mean sentiment either way, but something tells me they're not as familiar with the classic, LAN-party, Quake server you'd run.