Are private servers piracy? Inside the ESA fight with Nodecraft's Jonathan Yarbor
The ESA told California lawmakers private servers are piracy. NodeCraft's Jonathan Yarbor on the terminology it botched and why licensing beats litigating.
When a trade group that speaks for nearly every major game publisher stands in front of California lawmakers and calls running a private server piracy, it is worth stopping to ask what actually got said. You can download a Minecraft server from Minecraft's own website. So either the biggest sandbox on earth is built on piracy, or the terminology fell apart somewhere. Jonathan Yarbor, co-founder of the game-server host NodeCraft, thinks it is the second one, and he sees a kernel of truth worth untangling rather than a villain worth dunking on.
The ESA conflated two very different things
Yarbor's first move is to separate what got mashed together. There are bootleg servers: cracked copies of an MMO that let players connect to an unofficial host and cut the studio's revenue off entirely. World of Warcraft is the long-standing example. Those have no IP license, no redeeming role in the ecosystem, and the lawsuits around them almost always land for the studios. Then there are community and private servers, the Minecraft model, where buying and launching your own server is a native, licensed part of playing the game.
The ESA's own July 1 clarification concedes the point: its representative was answering a multipart question in which the committee used the terms community server and private server interchangeably. The rally-worthy target is the bootleg server. The thing everyone panicked about, your town's Minecraft world, was never really the point.
Most private servers are just three friends who want to play
The word private is doing more work than people think. When Yarbor looks at who actually rents a game server from NodeCraft, 90 to 92 percent of them are not building a community for their town, school, or Discord. They saw someone play a game on YouTube, they want to try it with two friends, and they need a server to make it happen. The intent is private.
The tool that enforces that intent is allow-listing, the modern name for whitelisting: you name the players who can join, and no one else gets in, even though the server is technically on the internet. Yarbor calls it the gold standard for a private game server, and it is the same social contract as the old password-protected servers. It is the bedrock of playing with friends, and of a creator running a stream with trusted members instead of random accounts. None of that is anywhere near a bootleg server.
Studios killed private servers because of the money, not malice
Ask why AAA games stopped shipping private servers and the honest answer, in Yarbor's words, is follow the money. A studio carries a long tail of cost: server hosting runs somewhere between 10 and 25 cents per monthly active user, and a one-time sixty-dollar purchase cannot be rationed across the years a player stays. Live-service monetization, the Fortnite crossovers, the skins, the K-pop Demon Hunters and Star Wars deals, keeps kicking that runway out so the game stays profitable and the servers stay on.
Against that, a private server looks like a void of revenue instead of a wealth of it, and it is volatile: the hosting industry jokes that a private-server customer lasts about three months per game update before drifting to the next game. So the executive question, how does my game make money if I do this, has no clean answer, and that, not malice, is why AAA has stayed away.
License, don't litigate
Yarbor's alternative is a four-word thesis, and the history backs it. Not a single court case around mods has ended in more than a settlement; the only rulings that damaged fans were about hack clients that broke the game's business model. Much of the rest likely falls under fair use, which is exactly why studios rarely take it all the way. Fighting your own fans in court, the way some did over Skyrim mods before Steam Workshop turned that fight into enormous growth, is a losing posture.
“It's license, don't litigate as the model.”
The upside is not just avoiding a fight. NodeCraft works with studios like Rockstar and the FiveM team precisely because a licensed platform can scan for bad actors and content violations, control what runs, and revoke access when someone does something stupid, all while cutting the IP holder in on the revenue. Real-brand cars modded into FiveM are Rockstar's single biggest liability, and the point Yarbor keeps making to IP holders is to treat this like Roblox: grant server owners a monetized right to your IP, keep the kill switch, and share the upside with people who are more excited to build than you are.
Games don't have to die
The clearest case for the model is a game that was supposed to be dead. When NCSoft ran out of budget for City of Heroes, a bootleg server was already forming from players who refused to lose the game they loved. Instead of punishing them while the game collapsed, the parties signed an IP agreement that legitimized the server. Yarbor points to the same shape in Project 1999 for EverQuest and the Black Mesa mod for Valve's Half-Life: sunset a live game into licensed private or community servers, hand over the keys, and the content does not have to stop, because server owners and modders keep building on top of it.
This is where stop killing games and NodeCraft's world meet. A game does not have to choose between staying on the studio's servers forever and vanishing. There is a licensed middle path where players keep it alive, and the studio keeps some control and some revenue instead of none.
The trifecta that changes a publisher's mind
What is new, Yarbor argues, is that the objections finally have answers at the same time. A few years ago platforms like Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox said absolutely not, and the trust-and-safety risk was real. Now the tooling has caught up: platforms can read player intent, and LLMs help build a pattern of behavior from how players chat and get moderated. NodeCraft Studio, the company's SDK, lets a studio launch licensed private or community servers, tie revenue back, and separate how players access content, with app-store-style review and instant revocation for violations.
Stack those together, a legal framework, a technical framework, and a revenue model, and you have the trifecta that flips a nervous publisher from a hard no to leaning in. The lack of commitment, not the lack of possibility, is what has been yielding the weak results studios point to when they say it is not worth it. Minecraft was never built as a model game; people just could not help themselves. The lesson for everyone else is that letting them is how you get forever fans.
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