I recently came across a video by Loyal Moses titled “They’re Banning Your Home Server”.
This got me thinking about what it means for anyone who likes running their own gear.
The industry lobby’s framing around private servers feels like a major mask-off moment for big tech, treating user-controlled hardware as a threat.
I have written a short piece in reaction to the video and would love to hear your thoughts.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
Love how they consider this piracy now, when for a long long time corporate hosting of multiplayer servers wasn’t even a thing that existed. You either self hosted or paid a hosting service.
The article is a short read, anyone who usually skips over the headline is welcome to read it.
the trade group speaking for corporate giants like Microsoft, Sony, and Electronic Arts, […] stood up in front of lawmakers and declared that community-operated, private game servers are essentially a form of illegal piracy. To back that up, they actually pointed at community-run Minecraft servers, arguing that running your own multiplayer instance outside of corporate control is a black market threat that lacks proper safety standards […] They are trying to shape the law and public narrative to brand independent, user-controlled hardware as suspicious, unsafe, and legally shady.
Doesn’t Minecraft explicitly support hosting game servers?
I thought that was the whole point of Minecraft
I have a feeling Microsoft has been itching to shut down the Java edition since they acquired it. They just know how much publicly comes from content based on the Java edition.
For sure.
Streamers and content creators all use Java.
Those creators are the very reason Minecraft gets as much reach as it does.
If it wasn’t for them, Java would be long dead and the game would be stuffed with microtransactions.
As a long-time player and Java server operator, all I can say is thank you to the streamers for keeping a good thing going.
Yeah, I have like a half dozen MC containers sitting idle and the kids have access in Proxmox to start and stop them if they want to play. They play bedrock on their Switches but that’s the only place they play it.
They do, but it certainly wasn’t Microsoft’s idea. That’s been around since before they bought Minecraft, and it’s very clear that they don’t like it. They’ve added all kinds of dark pattern bullshit, like hiding private servers way at the bottom of the page and blocking them from console users entirely (requiring third party workarounds).
I don’t think they’re lying when they say they consider it piracy.There’s also an EULA that you have to check the box for before you download the server software that basically amounts to “I acknowledge and accept that Microsoft can shut this down whenever they want for no reason at all and I have no recourse if they decide to do that.”
They consider it piracy out of convenience. What they case about is telemetry. They want all the event data from user interaction. Any such data is a gold mine for training AI. That makes it an asset in their eyes. An asset that the poor plebs get to keep and not even use for self-interested spy shit? Microsoft: “that’s not fair! Piracy!!”
Love how they’re trotting out the piracy argument while AI companies have done the most widespread pirating of information and data to date yet operate openly and unscathed by accusations by this group.
When individuals do it, it’s PIRACY!!!
When corporations do it, it’s merely copyright violations.
[…] treating user-controlled hardware as a threat
It is a massive threat. They are ready to move from “you don’t own any of your software” to rental and cloud models so you don’t own your hardware either. How dare you to undermine those plans with self-owned and self-operated cost efficient hardware?
It’s not. “Normal” people think running my own Jellyfin server is impressive, and I’m a scrub doing it for fun. Most people will never be able to pull off self-hosting anything, it’s too much work.
I have no doubt that these corporations (well, some of them) consider it a “threat”. “Massive”, though? No.
If it was a “massive threat” they would’ve lobbied long and hard long ago, joining with the MPAA and RIAA (which Sony was part of even back then!) in the 90s and 2000s era of “you wouldn’t download a car!”
Yes, even back then people were hosting their own game servers and not much has changed, really other than there’s a lot more online games now (even ones that shouldn’t be “online”).
This feels like corporate lobbyists trying to justify their jobs. Hopefully they’ll get “outsourced to AI” soon and articles like this will become a thing of the past. Replaced with AI-written legislation making the news because now rocks are required on all pizzas.
If it was a “massive threat” they would’ve lobbied long and hard long ago, joining with the MPAA and RIAA
They are in fact lobbying for legislation that declares self-hosting a security risk and akin to piracy. The fact that they use Minecraft servers as an example actually shows that this is not even remotely a new thing, but that they are working on those idiotic arguments for quite some time.
In the 90s and 2000s self-hosting was just not as simple yet. But nowadays cheap SoCs can basically handle the vast majority of the stuff they want to “sell” you as a service (and get your private data at the same time). The new frontier is AI (and only because they have driven up pices so much - else even self-hosted AI would be more prevalent). Everything else most people use, from messages to calendars to collaboration tools to media hubs to “cloud” storage, you can do yourself on devices with some low double digit price tag (the storage itself is now the more expensive part - again thanks to the AI bubble). Or next to free given all the older consumer hardware Windows11 just made obsolete…
I just don’t think it was possible back then. Not enough internet bandwidth/integration.
Now, cloud gaming is just another use case/revenue stream for data centers.
Not really. It’s something that’s been around for a very long time and popularity has only wained as time goes on and people find other ways to host their content. It’s really not a threat to any corpos, as much as I wish it was.
I cannot believe this argument. I’d like to see the numbers. I bet sell hosting is a drop in the ocean.
It sounds like you agree with me…?
