A U.S. Bill Wants Buying a Game to Mean Actually Owning It

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15^th congressional district has introduced a bill called the Power To The Players Act. It directs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to establish rules curbing the business practices that work against game buyers.

The core idea is simple: purchasing a video game should grant the consumer ownership of it, not a revocable license to play. Under the bill, games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down.

Torres is not the first to take the players' side. Pennsylvania state senator John Kane recently introduced the Protect Our Games Act, which would require publishers to offer an offline mode, community servers, or a refund of at least 25% of the price.

Why this became a problem

Games keep getting more expensive, yet they effectively come with an expiration date. Sony's stance is telling: in its defense in an ongoing class action, its lawyers argued that clicking the "purchase" button obviously should not lead a consumer to believe they are acquiring a durable right to use the game rather than a revocable license — essentially a one-time rental fee the company can revoke whenever it suits them.

Among the high-profile examples is the racing game The Crew: in 2024 Ubisoft shut down its servers, rendering the game unplayable even for those who had just bought it. The publisher offered no offline mode and no community servers, since even the single-player campaign depended on a connection. Torres specifically cited NBA 2K25: the game is being pulled from digital storefronts and its servers shut down just two years after release. Another case is Overwatch 2, which simply replaced the first game rather than leaving it separately available.

The Stop Killing Games movement

The Crew's shutdown spawned the Stop Killing Games campaign, demanding that publishers leave games functional after discontinuation — via an offline mode, peer-to-peer patching, and the ability to host community servers. The movement also pushes back against the industry standard of selling games as revocable licenses rather than outright ownership of the copy.

Concrete definitions and details of the bill have yet to be released. It is unclear whether the right to transfer that Torres mentioned would be mandatory for digital purchases — it will more likely be relevant for physical copies. It is also important that the bill strictly define what ownership is and what rights owners have over their copy.

A popular rallying phrase among players is "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing." Supporters note that pirated copies are often the better experience: no DRM slowing the game down, and a permanent copy publishers cannot break. How well the bill will achieve its aims remains unknown, but it is a notable step against the current direction of the industry.

Source: Hacker News