protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist

Nanny State BS. If someone runs a private server, it's their responsibility to moderate it.

and would leave rights holders liable.

No it wouldn't.

In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only

Unreal Tournament games are online or multiplayer only games. Even though Epic shut down the master servers, you can modify the .ini file to redirect to a community server. "Online-only" translates to predatory monetization models.

lol. Games like The Crew aren’t super hard to be turned into a single player game. Nobody is asking them to add a 20 hour single player campaign with a fleshed out storyline. Just add bots and open up the game to be driven around in without an online connection.

... as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist...

There are third party options for this.

... and would leave rights holders liable.

Liable for what? A service everyone knows they're no longer providing? Are car manufacturers still liable for 50 year old rusty cars people still drive? Can Apple today be held liable for a software vulnerability in the Lisa or the Mac II?

In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

Then don't design games that way. Don't make games like these. This is good news, actually.

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable

Straight fucking lie, the ones liable are the uploader and the host, which after official support ends is no longer the rights holders.

Dear Video Games Europe!

Bullshit.

Best Wishes,

I don't know who are these people. And they have achieved in record time that I never want to really heard them anymore.

“many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only”

So change your design? The corporate mind cannot comprehend this.

many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

<Oh no this would kill live service games

Here are the board members of this organisation in case someone is curious about their relevancy/neutrality on the matter:

• Hester Woodliffe – Chair (Warner Bros. Games)
• Canon Pence (Epic Games)
• Kerry Hopkins (Electronic Arts)
• Ian Mattingly (Activision)
• Klemens Kundratitz (Embracer)
• Qumar Jamil (Microsoft)
• Clemens Mayer-Wegelin (Nintendo of Europe)
• Cinnamon Rogers (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
• Matt Spencer (Take 2)
• Alain Corre (Ubisoft)
• Alberto Gonzalez-Lorca (Bandai Namco Entertainment)
• Karine Parker (Square Enix)
• Mark Maslowicz (Level Infinite)
• Felix Falk (game)
• Nicolas Vignolles (SELL)
• David Verbruggen (VGFB)
• Nick Poole (UKIE)

You know, the people who "ensured that the voice of a responsible games ecosystem is heard and understood" (direct quote from their website).

Absolute trash statement, I really hope this bites them.

They're just repeating a lot of the same misinformation that Pirate Software had been saying, the exact things that had riled the gaming community and caused this latest wave of action. We're already primed to discount the points they're trying to make and it shows exactly how disingenuous they're being.

Positively, I hope this reflects some true fear on their end.

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

As has been stated over and over and over again, private servers used to be an option until the industry decided they weren't any more. If the result of this is that it forces the industry to not make shitty, exploitative games, that's still a win for the consumers. I would rather have no game at all than something that psychologically tries to exploit my FOMO and drains my wallet.

I 100% guarantee the people who wrote that statement don't know or care how much effort it would take to build the infrastructure to run their server-side components.

I'm fairly confident that any AAA production uses Infrastructure As Code to spin up infrastructure in their dev and qa environments, so it's literally just a matter of handing over the Terraform or BICEP and some binaries for any custom code they need to use. I also highly, HIGHLY doubt that the vast majority of game servers are hosted on-prem. They're most likely either using Azure or AWS.