As any clued-in gamer can tell you, the prospect of actually owning the video games you’ve purchased has never been shakier. Sony recently tried to convince customers that they don’t own any games digitally purchased from the PlayStation Store, gaslighting us into thinking we’ve merely been buying a limited, revocable software license. There’s a simmering sense that greedy corporate suits are trying to strip us of our right to own things so they can siphon money from our wallets in perpetuity with subscription models.
Is game ownership on the verge of death? Maybe not, if a new bill proposed by Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY) actually makes it through Congress, as reported by Kotaku.
Dubbed the “Power to Players Act” (a nod to the old GameStop slogan), the bill would direct the FTC to enforce real digital ownership. Under the proposal, buying a game would grant full rights to own, play, and transfer it, rather than paying $70 for a glorified Blockbuster rental that disappears when the publisher decides the game no longer needs to exist. And these suits wonder why the piracy scene is thriving.
The ‘Power to Players Act’ Could Give Gamers More Control Over the Games They Buy
Torres is even picked as the poster child for the debate: NBA 2K25. It came out in late 2024, raked in millions by selling 11.5 million units as of August 2025, making it the fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the US and the 18th best-selling game of 2025, and already its publisher, 2K Games, is delisting it and killing its servers, rendering major modes unplayable. Torres’ bill would force publishers to build offline modes for online-dependent games so players can keep using what they bought for $60-$70.
What we’re seeing here is the US version of a legislative push gaining steam worldwide as part of the broader “Stop Killing Games” movement. The movement reached the European Citizens’ Initiative with over 1.29 million signatures, but the European Commission declined to propose new binding laws in June 2026. Torres’s version will no doubt face some heavy pushback from lobbyists who will claim that offline modes are too expensive to build.
Another issue is that most bills die before they reach a vote. But considering that just in the past month or so, AI-driven decompilation tools have so rapidly altered the landscape of the gaming industry, threatening to make every game released instantly open source and available to anyone, maybe there’s a chance that it lights a fire under the butt of some publishers to put some effort into preserving their games lest gamers permanently turn to AI decompilation.
The post Everything We Know About the ‘Power to Players Act,’ a New Bill That Could Change Gaming Forever appeared first on VICE.
