Congress Takes Up Gaming's Biggest Fight: Whether You Actually Own the Games You Buy

On October 30, 2K Games will pull NBA 2K25 from digital storefronts. Two months later, at the end of December, the servers supporting the game's online modes go dark. For a game that millions of players paid $70 for, or $99.99 for the All-Star Edition, and which ranked as the fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the United States, that is a brutal depreciation curve. The modes most people bought it for will simply stop existing, a little more than two years after launch.

That sequence, delisting followed by a server shutdown, has become routine across the games industry. This week, for the first time, it drew a federal response. Representative Ritchie Torres, the Democratic congressman for New York's 15th district, announced plans to introduce legislation called the Power to the Players Act, which would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules protecting players' ownership rights over the digital games they buy. Kotaku first reported the legislation after a phone interview with Torres.

What the bill would require

Under the proposal, companies selling digital games would have to grant players more than a revocable license. The bill centers on three rights: the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games people buy. Games that depend on online servers would also have to offer an offline mode that keeps functioning once official servers are switched off.

The transfer right is the one that stings. On every cartridge from the Atari 2600 through the Wii, a player could resell or lend a game. Digital storefronts quietly removed that possibility, replacing physical ownership with licenses that publishers can alter or revoke. Torres described the bill as a return to that earlier norm rather than a radical invention, calling it a restoration to the historical norm of the cartridge and disc era. He also framed it as an affordability issue: as game prices climb, players should get more rights, not fewer.

The movement that dragged Congress into the room

The Power to the Players Act is the first concrete federal response to the Stop Killing Games movement, the player-led campaign demanding that companies stop selling games that can be rendered completely unplayable when online support ends. The movement's signature example remains Ubisoft's The Crew, which went dark and took 12 million copies with it, according to TechSpot, leaving owners with nothing to play.

The announcement also lands on a calendar that has players nervous. Sony will reportedly end production on PlayStation discs for its next console generation, a move reported this summer that would push the next PlayStation toward an all-digital future. And next month, Grand Theft Auto VI ships with just a download code in the box at a starting price of $80, giving buyers of the physical edition no fallback copy if Rockstar ever revokes access. Each step makes the question of what a purchase actually buys more urgent, and more uncomfortable for publishers.

"A rental disguised as a sale"

Torres leaned into plain-spoken framing. "A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase," he said. "It is a rental disguised as a sale." He added what he called a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it.

"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 is no outsider to the culture he wants to regulate. He told Kotaku he grew up playing Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil, and SOCOM, and his framing deliberately casts the bill as a correction of something the industry took away rather than a new government invention. It is a canny political framing: the bill does not ask publishers to support servers forever, only to make sure the game still works in some form when the servers stop.

The long odds and the narrow scope

Crucially, the bill has not been introduced yet. Torres announced his intention to introduce it, but as of October 16 the legislation exists as an announcement and a press release, with detailed language, exceptions, and a parliamentary timeline still to come. TechSpot's assessment was blunt: the proposal is short on detail and long on obstacles. Directing the FTC to write ownership rules is a delegation, not a finished law, and the commission would still have to define what ownership means for software, how offline modes must behave, and what happens to games already sold.

The bill also covers only video games, not movies, music, or books bought digitally. Torres told Kotaku he hopes a gaming-specific win would set a precedent to be followed elsewhere, but for now the scope is deliberately narrow, which keeps the fight winnable. The industry's public response is not yet out, but publishers have every incentive to argue that mandatory offline modes and transfer rights would break the economics of live-service games, the segment that generates most of the industry's revenue.

Whether or not the bill ever becomes law, its announcement marks a shift. For years the ownership debate lived in forums, petitions, and the comment sections under delisting notices. Now it has a name and a backer in Congress. The question players have been asking, "do I own this game or am I just renting it?", is finally being asked there too.