What the ESA actually said
At a California hearing on the Protect Our Games Act, an ESA representative equated player-run private servers — the Minecraft realm your cousin hosts included — with piracy. The clip got out. The clip did numbers.
Why it backfired
The bill in front of the committee is narrow: it protects the ability to keep single-player and community-run games playable after publishers pull the plug. The ESA's own testimony made that protection sound extremely reasonable.
Preservationists have been arguing the same thing for a decade without getting this much airtime. One bad quote did more work than a hundred blog posts.
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