ESA lobbyist calls Minecraft and Call of Duty community servers 'illegal' as California's Protect Our Games Act fails

California's Protect Our Games Act — backed by the Stop Killing Games movement — was voted down in the State Senate, but the hearing produced a moment that's now drawing heavy scrutiny: an ESA lobbyist told lawmakers that community servers for Minecraft and Call of Duty are illegal.

Jennifer Gibbons, the ESA's VP of state government affairs, told legislators the servers break the law and that the ESA considers them piracy. "They're illegal," Gibbons said. "They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft." She also claimed the ESA has two pending lawsuits against private servers and pointed to the US Trade Representative's Notorious Markets Report — which flags sites that let players bypass subscription fees — as evidence. The problem: neither Minecraft nor classic Call of Duty require subscriptions to play, and Minecraft's own official website links to community servers. Critics, including PC Gamer and Video Games Chronicle, noted that Gibbons appeared to conflate legitimate fan-run servers with the commercial piracy operations the USTR actually targets. The ESA later doubled down in a statement, arguing that private servers "infringe on the intellectual property rights of game publishers" and operate without publisher oversight or safety standards.

Stop Killing Games formed after Ubisoft shut down The Crew, leaving paying customers with an unplayable game. Activists have since pushed for legislation in Europe and North America requiring publishers to keep older games functional after official support ends. Publishers have pushed back, arguing that such requirements would make games "prohibitively expensive to create." The California bill, AB 1921, was the movement's most prominent North American legislative push to date.

A Stop Killing Games advocate accused Gibbons of making claims "designed to scare a busy legislator who does not have time to fact-check a well-dressed lobbyist in real time" — and made clear the defeat isn't the end. "We are not stopping. Not even close," the statement reads. "We intend to introduce versions of this in other state legislatures, and we are seriously looking at the federal level. The ESA is about to learn what it is like to fight on many fronts at once. They have to win every single time to keep things the way they are. We only have to win once to change them."