So, Gamers Nexus covered this one, but apparently some pro gaming industry group testified before the California senate and argued unironically that community servers for games are "piracy."
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WHAT THE ACTUAL ####?! Seriously. F these guys, why the F are we taking these people seriously? Who the hell, outside of the major corporations who wanna exert more control over the game play models they provide to fleece people out of more money want this?
NO ONE! THAT'S WHO!
And yet, these guys get attention. My god, I hate how corrupt our government is. This is why people dont care about democracy any more. Doesnt matter if its republican or democrat, these MFers will get their voices heard, and both parties will cave to them. Corporatist democrats are almost as bad as republicans in this regard.
The fact is, we are governed by people who dont know how the internet works. Sure, we may have come somewhat of a way from the "series of tubes" idiots in the 2000s, but I doubt many of these congresspeople are gamers and know F all about the gaming industry.
So...here's how community servers work. For most of early online gaming, community servers were THE way to play games. Almost all games in the 2000s on PC used community servers. Not consoles as much, but their ecosystems evolved separately where the corporations exerted more control. You had xbox live for example as an early online model, and yeah, you can see where that was going, with them charging $50 a year just so people can use their own internet.
Over time, community servers became less common. They held pretty strong with most games through I'd say, the mid 2010s, but there were shifts earlier than that. You had MMOs that used their own servers, because they were subscription model, and some people did form their own private services which bypassed the official ones and were essentially piracy. I think that's where this argument came from. I know despite many games having community servers, they also relied on the infrastructure of the companies to access a master server, like gamespy arcade or EA games. Like when BF2/2142 went offline, some tried to do community servers there, and EA said that was piracy and that was squashed. But all in all, for the most part, yeah, early gaming used community servers. hell, the game being discussed I think was minecraft? That DEFINITELY uses community servers, at least on java. Bedrock is a bit different and more consolized but even that has a community server option IIRC. Dont quote me on that, but yeah.
The point is, everyone and their mother can make and own a minecraft server. back in the early days of 2011, my college buddy ran a server off of his fricking laptop. I mean...who are we kidding here?
That's why this argument is so ridiculous. There's so much context and nuance here.
Here's the thing. The internet has been a certain way since its inception. In the 2020s, it seems like corporations are trying to rewrite the rules. More age verification. More corporate control. Less user choice and customizability. We really are heading toward a "you will own nothing and be happy" society. They're pushing for subscription everything. They dont want you to own anything, they want you to rent it from them. These ESA guys, they argue against right to repair, arguing that it facilitates piracy, they argue in favor of subscription services, they argue against community servers, it's ridiculous. It's all about rewriting the rules so...again, youll own nothing and be happy. You dont have control over the hardware you buy (if you can even buy hardware in the future, some are arguing that they're trying to kill consumer electronics so they can rent you crap from the cloud), the operating systems you use, the software you buy, and anything against their preferred model in their view is "piracy." It's ridiculous.
And you know what? F intellectual property in its current form. I'm not opposed to a BASIC version of IP, I mean, corporations gotta make money somehow, but theres a huge middle ground between "everything is free" and "lifetime + 75 years + whatever BS stipulations that impose about how you dont really own what you buy." For gaming I think a reasonable amount of time is around.....eh....10-15 years? That's 2011-2016. Maybe you could argue 15-20. Anything more than 20 is just...kinda ridiculous IMO.
And I definitely advocate for an OWNERSHIP model. Like you own a right to play the games you bought. I support the stop killing games movement more or less, and you know what? if corporations no longer wanna support a game with heavily integrated online, then HEY, YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT MIGHT PRESERVE IT FOR THOSE WHO WANNA PLAY IT?! COMMUNITY SERVERS!
Seriously, games used to be a product. Games as a service is cancer. Okay, I won't say it's all bad. It depends on the game and what it's trying to do. Some games as a service are actually pretty good. A lot of online games tend to evolve over the years. I think it's contextual. But that's the thing. ALL of this is contextual. Single player games, those are products, and should be treated as such, not services. Multiplayer, I mean, they can be good as a service, but sometimes aren't. And some models like MMOs have been subscription based for decades, which is, btw, why i never got into MMOs. To be fair there are a lot of free ones as well and I just...genuinely dont like MMOs. I find them boring. But I digress.
And on the piracy argument, here's my honest stance: companies should try to outmaneuver the pirates. Rather than focusing on draconian systems of control, they should do things like:
1) Offer a good service, Gabe Newell of Steam (PC gaming's savior) views piracy as a service problem, and argues if you offer games cheaply enough and through a good enough service, most will pay. Given the guy owns several yachts, he seems to know what he's talking about.
2) Innovate. Whether it be security on their own platforms, or new games, and new consoles every so often (at a reasonable price of course, not the $1k monstrosities they seem to be pushing for next gen). Seriously, every system will eventually be hacked or cracked. It's not if, it's when, the key is to delay that to outside of the core window of profitability for the game involved. Emulation is normally a thing that comes well after a console's lifespan, with the exception of nintendo since they make their hardware so weak in the firstt place. But yeah, they just gotta outrun the proliferation of piracy as I see it. Swap consoles every so often, assume everything will eventually be cracked or emulated and have a plan to move on to the next thing by the time it is.
3) Put up with it. I mean, these industries make billions of dollars already. They're not hurting. Consumers are buying. They clearly got enough money to send lobbyists to washington DC. Honestly, the whole point of IP laws is to protect corporations' ability to profit off of a product for a set amount of time. As I see it, that time should be heavily curtailed. Again, instead of life+75 years, I'd probably argue 10-20 years for video games. And....as I see it, the current systems works well enough for the corporations. THese guys are rich already. Why do they need to change the laws to be even more draconian and protectionist? These guys are just greedy.
Really...you can tell I'm not super sympathetic to the corporations here. Well, I never really am. As I see it, I'm fine with the current rules surrounding the internet and technology mostly, and I wanna preserve that 1990s-2000s wild west internet feel. These weird dystopian pushes in the 2020s are just no...and these guys are gonna ruin the internet, gaming, and technology as we know it with their greed. They really do want you to own nothing and be happy.
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