U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres plans to introduce a bill to Congress aimed at protecting players’ ability to own and operate the video games they purchased, at a time when the gaming industry is increasingly relying on digital licenses and servers that companies may later shut down.
The proposal is called the Power to the Players Act and has not yet been formally introduced in Congress. According to the announcement, the bill would direct the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to establish rules preventing situations in which users effectively lose access to a game they paid for.
The Digital Ownership Problem
The bill cites NBA 2K25 as an example of the issue. The game launched in 2024 at a price of $70 and is scheduled to be removed from digital stores on October 30, about two years after its release. 2K also announced that it would shut down the servers supporting online play modes in December, meaning the version players purchased will lose a major part of its functionality before the end of the year.
Shutting down servers does more than prevent the game from being purchased in the future; in games that rely on persistent connectivity or cloud services, the shutdown may make the version users have limited in functionality or effectively unplayable.
What Would Change in Practice?
The Power to the Players Act proposes treating purchased games as users’ property rather than as revocable licenses, while also requiring companies to provide an offline play mode when they plan to shut down their servers. Torres told Kotaku in an interview that this protection would, as he described it, represent a return to a model that was common before digital distribution came to dominate the gaming market.
The discussion opened by the bill could extend to digitally purchased books, films, and music, according to Torres, but the current proposal focuses on video games.
Legislative and Judicial Obstacles
The announcement does not guarantee that the proposal will become law. The bill could fail in committee, as happened with a similar bill in California that ended in June. Choosing the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the rules also raises an important legal question regarding the limits of its authority.
Following a 2024 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned the Chevron deference doctrine, courts have become less inclined to accept federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws. This could enable challenges to any rules the commission establishes for the gaming industry, similar to what happened with its attempt to ban non-compete agreements, when a judge halted implementation of the rule on the grounds that the commission lacked the necessary authority.
certi.news analysis: The proposal highlights a practical gap between what consumers believe they are buying when they purchase a digital product and the rights companies actually grant through licensing. But its impact will remain uncertain until the bill’s text is published and the scope of companies’ obligations is defined. Its legislative fate and the FTC’s ability to enforce its rules also remain open questions. Engadget asked Torres to share a draft of the bill and comment on the possibility of it being blocked in court.