Rep. Torres Proposes a Bill to Make Game Purchases Ownership

Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, announced on 15 October 2026 that he will introduce the Power To The Players Act, a bill that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules protecting the right of consumers to own and play the video games they buy. The announcement is not a filing. As of 18 October there is no bill number, no text, no committee assignment, no cosponsor list and no vote, so what the proposal would do in practice, and whether it could survive a court challenge, remains unknown.

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The press release describes three rights: to own, to play and to transfer. Buying a game would give the buyer ownership of the game instead of a licence to play it. Games with online functionality would have to provide an offline mode before the servers that support them are turned off. The bill would also preserve the ability to own and resell games.

Torres framed the change as a return to an older arrangement. He called it a “restoration to the historical norm,” pointing to how games were bought and played in the 1990s, according to his release and Ars Technica. “When you pay for a game, you should own it,” he said. Consumers, he added, “must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy.”

The proposal arrives in a fight that has been building outside Congress. The Stop Killing Games movement has lobbied publishers to keep games playable after they discontinue support, and the argument has moved from forum threads into consumer politics. Torres's release leans on the same complaint: a purchase that stops working when a company decides to stop paying for servers. Ars Technica's coverage places the bill in that longer campaign and notes the practical questions the release leaves open.

What the bill would actually change

The first change is legal. A purchase would transfer ownership of the game, not a licence that the publisher can revoke. That distinction matters because end-user licence agreements currently describe most digital purchases as a limited right to use software, which is why storefronts can remove access when a licence ends or a service closes.

The second change is operational. A publisher that wants to shut down servers for a game with online features would first have to provide a way to play it offline. The third concerns transfer: buyers would keep the right to resell a game, a practice that digital storefronts generally do not support.

Each of those sounds simple in a press release. The details are where the bill will live or die. What counts as an offline mode? Does a game need to remain fully playable, or only start? Would a publisher have to keep authentication servers alive long enough to verify ownership? Would resale apply to digital copies, physical discs, or both? None of those questions has an answer yet, because the text does not exist.

The NBA 2K25 case behind the announcement

Torres's release uses NBA 2K25 as its example. The basketball game launched on 6 September 2025, is scheduled to be delisted from digital storefronts on 30 October 2026, and will have its online servers shut down on 31 December 2026, roughly two years after release. IGN reported that the single-player story mode would become unplayable, a detail Ars Technica cited.

That timeline is short, but the sequence is familiar. A delisting removes the ability to buy the game. A server shutdown removes the ability to play the parts that depend on a connection, including modes that a buyer might reasonably think of as single-player. Both dates fall within the next three months, which gives the argument a concrete deadline instead of a hypothetical one.

NBA 2K25 is also a useful example because it is recent. This is not a decade-old title reaching the end of a long commercial life. It is a game from the current console generation that is already scheduled to lose functions. Polygon and Kotaku covered the announcement alongside the release, and Tom's Hardware focused on the licence question at the centre of it.

Why an offline mode is harder than it sounds

The offline requirement collides with how many modern games are built. Game state, matchmaking, player inventories, authentication and content updates often sit on servers. An offline mode is not a switch that a studio can flip at shutdown. It is a second version of the game, with its own save systems, its own handling of content that was designed to be delivered remotely, and its own testing burden.

Ars Technica notes that requiring an offline mode for games engineered around online servers may not be feasible without rethinking the architecture. That does not make the requirement impossible. It makes it expensive, and it moves a cost that currently lands at shutdown into the development budget, years before anyone knows whether the game will succeed.

There is a legal question stacked on the technical one. The bill, as described, tells the FTC to write rules instead of setting out the requirements itself. A rulemaking would take time, and nothing published so far settles whether courts would uphold the agency's authority to impose it.

The path through Congress

Most proposed bills never reach a vote, and this one has not been filed. It has no cosponsors, no committee referral and no hearing. A single member's announcement can set an agenda, but it does not create a law. The distance between a press release and a signed statute is usually measured in years, and often ends before the first committee markup.

Industry response has been quiet. No major publisher or platform holder had issued a formal public response to the announcement as of the reporting behind this article. Trade groups have historically opposed mandates that would require keeping server infrastructure running indefinitely, which is the part of the proposal that would cost them the most.

The backdrop extends beyond Congress. Sony has said it will stop making physical copies of PlayStation games in 2028, and its earnings show digital downloads were 82 percent of full-game unit sales across the PS4 and PS5, leaving less than a fifth on disc, Ars reported. A disc is not a loophole. Many physical copies still depend on servers for updates or online features, and licence agreements treat purchases as revocable. Preservation advocates have made that point for years. The shift to digital makes it harder to avoid.

Ars also raised a newer wrinkle. Recent AI tools have enabled a wave of game decompilations and reconfigurations, projects that are almost certainly illegal under current law but whose scale could reshape the preservation debate. If the tools make old games easier to keep running outside official channels, the case for mandating an offline mode may change, and so may the industry's incentive to fight it.

Caveats worth keeping in view

The central caveat is procedural. The bill is an announced intention, not introduced legislation. There is no number, no text, no committee and no vote. Its enforceability cannot be assessed, and neither can its scope. Statements about what the bill would require are statements about a description, not a statute.

The offline-mode requirement is described in the release and in coverage, but the enforcement mechanism is unknown until text exists. So is the definition of offline play, the treatment of games that are already delisted, and the question of who pays for the work. With no text, there is no answer on whether the rules would apply to games sold before the law passed, a detail that would decide how much of the existing catalogue is covered.

The politics are early. Torres is known for consumer and competition-focused work, which makes the proposal consistent with his record, but a single member's bill is not a committee agenda. The absence of a publisher response is not support or opposition. It is silence, and silence at this stage means little.

“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.” — Rep. Ritchie Torres, 15 October 2026

What to watch

The first test is procedural: whether a bill number and text appear, and whether the text matches the release. A number would move the story from a proposal to a document that can be scored, amended and challenged.

The second is the definition of offline mode. If the text requires a full offline version of every online game, the cost will be high and the opposition will be loud. If it requires something narrower, such as a playable single-player component, the bill will cover fewer games than the release implies.

The third is the response from publishers and platform holders. Trade groups have fought server mandates before, and their arguments about cost and feasibility will shape how the bill is received in committee. The fourth is the 30 October delisting of NBA 2K25, the first concrete date attached to the story. It will happen whether or not the bill moves.

Until a draft appears, there is nothing to score, nothing to amend and nothing to vote on. The announcement has done what an announcement can do: it has put a name and a set of demands in front of an industry that would prefer to keep the terms of sale as they are. The rest depends on a document that does not yet exist.

Cover image: "Ritchie Torres 117th U.S Congress.jpg" by the House Creative Committee, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.