ESA clarifies comments after game preservation backlash over community servers

The Entertainment Software Association spent July 1 walking back the sharpest part of its attack on game preservation, but its clarification still left fan-run servers outside any clear shield. The short answer for anyone asking whether this helps keep dead online games playable is no, not on its own. The ESA said it had been talking about private servers, not community servers, and stood by the position that unauthorized servers infringing publisher IP can be pursued by rights holders.

The fight flared at a June 29 hearing of the California Senate Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee over AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act. Chris Ward, the bill’s sponsor in the California Assembly, pointed to community-hosted servers as a way to keep games alive after publishers shut down official infrastructure, naming Minecraft and Call of Duty as examples. The bill had already passed the California State Assembly 43-16 in May, then hit a 4-3 Senate committee vote with four abstentions on June 29 before reconsideration was granted.

AB 1921 is aimed at the ugly shutdown problem that preservation groups keep hammering on: a paid game can vanish when the servers disappear. Its amended text would require a digital game operator to warn purchasers and prospective purchasers 60 days before ending services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, then provide an alternate version, a patch or update, or a refund, while barring sale or distribution of a version that cannot be used independently of operator-controlled services. That is the preservation ask in plain English: if a publisher kills the backend, the customer should not lose the whole game with it.

Jennifer Gibbons, the ESA vice president of state government affairs, took a far broader shot during the hearing, calling community servers “illegal” and describing them as a black market before saying, “we consider it piracy.” The ESA’s follow-up tried to narrow that back down, saying the committee had mixed together the terms “community server” and “private server,” and that private servers hosting or distributing copyrighted game content without authorization infringe publisher rights. The United States Trade Representative does publish an annual Notorious Markets List for counterfeiting and piracy, but that enforcement tool does not settle the bigger preservation question: what happens to a purchased game when official support ends and only fan-run infrastructure is left.

That gap is exactly why the ESA’s clarification still stings preservation advocates. Minecraft’s own site pushes players toward third-party servers and maintains an official server-listing ecosystem plus dedicated server software, which is a built-in example of publisher-tolerated community play, not a piracy free-for-all. Stop Killing Games, the campaign behind the broader push, says it began in 2024 after Ubisoft shut down The Crew and used that case to argue that buyers should not lose access to paid games when publisher-controlled services end. The ESA may have softened the wording, but it did not give dead online games the one thing preservation groups actually need: a clear legal path for fan-run servers to keep them playable.