How are private servers allowed to operate without being struck down by copyright infringement or something similar? How was the source code obtained?
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Depends on the game. Some games like older FPS games had private servers built into the game because they really didn’t have central servers. Others are done in an illegal way like people who run private World of Warcraft servers, but the only reason anyone care about those is because Blizzard is expecting their $15 a month. Most companies don’t care about private servers because they’re not losing money from you doing it and anyone who is playing on those servers knows what they’re getting into so the company doesn’t have to worry about “protecting” them from cheaters or whatever.
Did you have a specific game you were thinking about when asking this question?
On many newer games, the developers don’t want to front the bill (and responsibility of moderation and hosting) of hosting dedicated servers. Hackers, distance, internet providers, greed, longevity, there’s a bunch of factors that go into why a dev might not want to host their own servers.
Usually it comes to location/distance and longevity, esp when combined with a workshop/mod friendly game. The devs don’t want to put the time and money into keeping a regulated and dedicated server open, and honestly rightly so in many cases. P2P (peer to peer, or any server that works based on a single person’s game state versus a ‘dedicated’ server that is running the environment independently) needs only one person online worldwide to host that game session. Dedicated servers have to be constantly maintained (and paid for) so some companies opt for their users having good enough connections that they could do a better job doing it that way vs having centralized servers physically located across the globe. Esp if it’s a smaller studio / one that’s working on another game immediately after release, the resources they don’t put into maintaining those lobbies can be spent on development of expansions, a sequel, a new IP, etc.
If the server is just connecting players to each other, and the content being played is part of the installed game, then there isn’t really much merit to an argument that the third party server is copyright infringement. It would be like taking your cell phone to a different carrier. You might be breaching a contract, but it’s not copyright infringement.
If the server is actively providing the content, and the third party server is serving that same content, that would be much more likely to be infringing.
Firstly, most of them are not hosted in the same country and are instead in places with very lax copywrite laws, the usual suspects are there if you search up countries with worst copywrite laws
Second, its simply not worth it for companies to sue, if we assume people on private servers weren’t going to pay for actual servers anyways the companies have lost nothing.
That being said, there are companies that will absolute go after every private server and copywrite violation, such as Nintendo.
One things nobody has touched on yet are clean room implementations of the games server software. By capturing the network traffic between the games client and server you can reverse engineer what the server must be doing and then write your own server software that does the same thing. Since you aren’t using the original software, and the server isn’t hosting/serving game assets there’s no copyright being infringed upon.
Of course this doesn’t apply to cases where the server software was leaked/stolen, or to cases where the server does in fact serve game assets.
You can’t copyright the structure of data packets exchanged between the client and the server. So the mere act of providing a private server isn’t a breach of copyright.
You don’t necessarily need the source code to host the server, you just need some program you can execute. If the server software was obtained and operated without the correct licensing/permission (eg. leaked/stolen code or binaries), that might be a copyright infringement. But that’s only a subset of the general concept of “private servers”.
Others may be using code that was developed to mimic the original server software, but as long as they don’t copy the original code (clean room development) there’s no legal problem. In other cases the game developers actively allow and encourage players to host their own private servers, freely providing the server component. People host their own Minecraft or CS:GO servers all the time (though there may be limitations to prevent exploiting certain aspects like online progress or awarding skins/loot).
There might also be a infringement if the serve software hosts copyrighted assets like maps, NPC models, story content, mission design etc. But whether that’s applicable depends on the design of the game and its online component.
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