Power To The Players Act: Rep. Ritchie Torres Wants the FTC to Make "Buy" Mean "Own" for Video Games

Every digital gamer knows the feeling: you spend $70 on a game, sink dozens of hours into it, and then one day it vanishes from your library, its servers go dark, or a storefront delisting strips away your ability to launch the thing you paid for. On October 15, 2026, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY-15) moved to put that frustration into federal statute, announcing plans to introduce the Power To The Players Act, legislation that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules ensuring that when consumers purchase a video game, they actually own it. The idea is enormously popular. The mechanism, at this stage, is remarkably fragile.

What follows is a clear breakdown of what the bill would do, why it is arriving now, and what stands between an announcement and an enforceable rule.

What the Power To The Players Act Would Actually Do

The first thing to understand is that this is an announced bill, not a formally introduced one. No public legislative text exists, and Torres's office framed the announcement as an intent to introduce. That means everything below should be read as stated intent rather than settled law. Details like enforceability, the scope of offline functionality, and the mechanics of transferring games across platforms remain undefined.

With that caveat in place, the core provision is straightforward. A purchase would confer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it. Torres distilled the principle in an interview with Kotaku: "I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it."

The bill frames this around three rights: the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer purchased games.

There is also an offline-mode requirement. Games with online functionality would need to offer an offline mode before their supporting servers are shut down. This is the provision most often misreported. The bill does not mandate that servers stay online forever, and it does not require publishers to maintain live-service infrastructure indefinitely. It requires that a purchased game remain playable in some form once the plug is pulled.

Torres has positioned the legislation as a "restoration to the historical norm" rather than a radical transformation. In the cartridge-and-disc era, a purchase was final: the game worked as long as the hardware did, regardless of what the publisher decided years later. The bill, in his framing, is about recovering that baseline for the digital marketplace.

Why Now: NBA 2K25, Disc Phase-Outs, and the Delisting Problem

Legislation rarely arrives without a catalyst, and Torres has a vivid one. NBA 2K25, which launched in September 2024 and was the fifth best-selling game in the US that year according to Circana's annual sales data, is being delisted on October 30, 2026, with its servers shutting down on December 31. The standard edition sold for $69.99, the All-Star Edition for $99.99. That is roughly two years between purchase and shutdown, and reporting from Kotaku indicates the single-player story mode becomes unplayable once the servers go dark.

Torres put the stakes bluntly in his announcement: "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."

The timing also reflects a broader shift in the industry. Sony has announced plans to phase out physical game discs by 2028, a move that sharpens the ownership question considerably. When discs disappear, every purchase becomes a license by default unless something changes.

The bill also aligns in spirit with the Stop Killing Games campaign, the grassroots effort founded by Ross Scott of Accursed Farms that lobbies against revocable digital licenses. The alignment is philosophical rather than organizational; the campaign's US presence remains limited, and there is no indication of direct involvement in drafting this legislation.

The Uphill Battle: Legal, Political, and Technical Headwinds

Three distinct obstacles stand in the bill's path, and each is substantial.

The political one is the most immediate. Torres did not confirm whether the bill will have cosponsors or any Republican support. In a divided Congress, a Democratic-sponsored consumer-protection bill directing a federal agency to regulate a multi-billion-dollar industry faces long odds without bipartisan backing. There is also a cautionary precedent: a similar California state bill failed a committee vote in June 2026, signaling that even state-level appetite for such measures has limits.

The legal obstacle is subtler but arguably more consequential. The bill directs the FTC to write regulations rather than establishing rules directly. That approach is riskier in the wake of Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the 2024 Supreme Court decision that overturned Chevron deference and curtailed agencies' power to interpret ambiguous statutes. Courts no longer automatically defer to an agency's reading of the law, which means even a passed bill could face sustained litigation over how far the FTC's rulemaking authority extends.

Then there is the technical reality. Some online games may be architecturally incapable of offering a meaningful offline mode without major re-engineering, as Ars Technica has noted. A game built entirely around server-side computation, persistent worlds, or real-time multiplayer cannot simply be flipped to offline with a patch. The bill does not specify what functionality an offline mode must preserve, leaving a significant question: does a bare menu screen count, or must the core experience survive?

States Are Moving Faster: Pennsylvania's Protect Our Games Act

While Congress deliberates, states are already drafting their own answers.

Pennsylvania's Protect Our Games Act, introduced by State Sen. John Kane, takes a different approach. Rather than directing an agency to write rules, it imposes direct requirements: publishers would need to provide an offline mode, allow independent servers, or offer a minimum 25% refund when support ends. According to reporting on the bill, it also includes a 60-day notice requirement.

The contrast is instructive. The Pennsylvania bill offers concrete remedies and specific numbers. The federal bill offers a framework and delegates the specifics to a rulemaking process that may take years and could be challenged in court. State-level efforts can move faster and produce tangible consumer protections, but they also create a patchwork of rules that publishers must navigate across jurisdictions.

Torres, for his part, has said he hopes the bill sets a precedent for ownership rights across the wider digital economy, extending the same logic to movies, music, and software. That scope matters strategically: broadening the bill beyond gaming invites opposition from the film, music, and enterprise software industries, each of which relies heavily on licensing models and maintains its own lobbying apparatus in Washington.

What to Watch, and What It Means for Your Library

The Power To The Players Act gives a name and a congressional voice to gaming's loudest grievance. That alone has value. For years, the ownership question has circulated in forums, Reddit threads, and campaigns like Stop Killing Games without a federal champion. Now it has one.

But an announced-but-unintroduced bill relying on FTC rulemaking in a post-Chevron world faces a steep climb. The path forward runs through three checkpoints worth watching: the release of actual bill text, the emergence of cosponsors and any Republican support, and committee action. Each will signal whether this is a serious legislative effort or a statement of intent destined to stall.

For players, the practical stakes are immediate. Your digital library exists at the pleasure of publishers and platform holders. Until the law changes, the safest assumption is that clicking "buy" secures something closer to a long-term rental than a permanent purchase. The Power To The Players Act proposes to change that. Whether it will is a question no one can answer yet.