When you buy a game digitally, you do not own it. You own a license, and the publisher can take it back the moment it decides to pull the plug. Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Bronx Democrat in Congress, announced a bill this week meant to end that: the Power To The Players Act.
The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules treating a digital purchase as actual ownership instead of a revocable license. Any game with online features would have to come with an offline mode that keeps working after the servers shut down, and buyers would get the right to transfer the games they paid for.
“If you pay for it, you own it.”
Rep. Ritchie Torres
Torres called a game that disappears when a company moves on “a rental disguised as a sale,” and framed the bill as a return to how buying games worked in the cartridge and disc era.
The timing is not random. NBA 2K25, one of the best selling games of 2024, gets delisted on October 30, barely two years after release, and its servers shut down on January 1, 2027. Modes like MyCAREER and MyTEAM, the ones players pour hundreds of hours into, die with them. Sony is also ending physical PlayStation discs starting in 2028, which would leave the digital license as the only way to buy a game at all.
The honest part: the bill has not been formally introduced yet, there are no confirmed cosponsors, and a similar California effort stalled in committee in June. This is the start of a long fight, not a done deal. But it is the first time the argument gamers have made for years, pushed hardest by the Stop Killing Games movement, has been carried into Congress by name.