Why it matters: Two years after Ubisoft's The Crew went dark and took 12 million copies with it, the question of whether you own the games you buy has finally reached Congress. A proposed bill by Representative Ritchie Torres is short on detail and long on obstacles, but it is the first federal attempt to answer a question the industry would rather leave alone.
The "Power to the Players Act" bill would direct the FTC to write rules ensuring that buying a video game translates into ownership and not a revocable license. Games that depend on online servers would also have to offer an offline mode before those servers are switched off. Rep. Ritchie Torres frames it around three rights: to own, to play, and to transfer the games people buy.
His announcement leans on a very timely example. NBA 2K25, which sold for $70 (or $100 for the All-Star Edition), will be pulled from digital storefronts on October 30 and lose its online servers on December 31, roughly two years after launch. It was one of the best-selling games in the US in 2024, and once the servers go, the modes most players bought it for go with them.
"A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale," Torres said. In a phone interview with Kotaku, the congressman, who grew up on Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil, and SOCOM, described the bill as a "restoration to the historical norm" of the cartridge and disc era.
The bill covers games only, not movies or music, though he hopes it sets a precedent for other digital purchases.
The proposal lands after a rough year for the Stop Killing Games movement. The campaign was started in 2024 by YouTuber Ross Scott after Ubisoft shut down The Crew and left some 12 million copies unplayable. The initiative collected over 1.2 million signatures, but in June the European Commission declined to propose legislation and instead offered to broker a "voluntary code of conduct" with publishers. That happened two weeks after the Commission met with Ubisoft and game industry lobbyists behind closed doors.
Weeks later, California's Protect Our Games Act (AB 1921) stalled in a state Senate committee, three votes short. That bill would have required 60 days' notice before a shutdown plus a remedy: an offline mode, support for community-run servers, or a full refund. The Entertainment Software Association lobbied against it, calling the requirements technically "unworkable" and, at one point, telling lawmakers that private Minecraft and Call of Duty servers amount to piracy, even though Minecraft's own EULA allows for them.
Despite lacking in details for now, Torres' bill could be more ambitious than anything that came before it. The failed California act accepted games' license model and focused on what happens at end of life. The Power to the Players Act goes after the license model itself, and a right to transfer implies a resale market for digital games, something no major storefront allows today. However, US courts have generally held that software sold under a license isn't covered by the first-sale doctrine, the rule that lets you resell a used disc.
Then there's Congress itself. The bill hasn't been formally introduced yet, and the vast majority of bills never reach a floor vote. On the other hand, publishers have already shown they will spend real money fighting proposals far narrower than this one.
– Stop Killing Games Official (@StopKilingGames) October 9, 2026
From the perspective of gamers, adding a mandatory offline mode or allowing community servers targets some of the right failure points. Publishers argue that licensed content like player likenesses, music, and car brands makes keeping old games alive impossible, but that sounds more like an excuse after pressure pushed Microsoft to allow Forza Horizon 4 downloads and play after delisting it, and Ubisoft eventually patched an offline mode into The Crew 2. NBA 2K is a harder case, since much of its value lives in online modes that 2K has argued players never owned in the first place.
Whatever happens to the bill, the debate is apparently now reaching federal stage.