A federal lawmaker wants the Federal Trade Commission to settle a question the games industry has dodged for two decades: when you buy a game, do you actually own it? On October 15, 2026, Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Democrat representing New York’s 15th congressional district, announced the Power To The Players Act, a proposal that would direct the FTC to write rules guaranteeing that a game purchase means ownership rather than a revocable license. “When you pay for a game, you should own it,” Torres said in the announcement, adding that “consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy.”
Tech-Insider has already covered the bill’s core consumer rights and the missing bill number, the search traffic backlash the announcement triggered, and what rewriting store EULAs could cost major platforms. What hasn’t been mapped out is where this proposal actually sits in the legal landscape: a scattered patchwork of state disclosure laws, an EU petition that cleared a signature threshold, and a graveyard of shut-down games that keeps growing. That context, pulled from named outlets covering the October 15 announcement, is the real story behind why Torres picked this exact moment to act.
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What the Power To The Players Act actually proposes
The confirmed elements of the proposal are narrower than some headlines suggest, and it’s worth being precise about them. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish consumer protections around video game purchases, according to the October 15 announcement. Two specific obligations anchor the proposal: a purchase should confer ownership of the game rather than merely a license to play it, and any game with online functionality would need to provide an offline mode before its supporting servers are shut down.
Torres framed the underlying consumer rights in three parts: the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer games that have been purchased. That three-part framing echoes the language used by digital preservation advocates for years, but Torres is the first member of Congress to attach it to a concrete legislative vehicle aimed at the FTC’s rulemaking authority.
What remains genuinely unresolved is everything downstream of the announcement. As of October 19, the bill had not been formally introduced in Congress, according to reporting from Digital Trends on the proposal. There is no public bill number, no committee assignment, no co-sponsor list, and no indication of which FTC rulemaking process would carry out the directive if the bill passed. Any claim that this is already law, or that it has cleared a congressional vote, is not supported by current reporting and should be treated as false until a formal text appears in the Congressional Record.
California already tried a narrower version of this fight
Torres isn’t the first lawmaker to try regulating the gap between what a storefront says and what a buyer actually receives. California’s AB 2426, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2024 and effective since January 1, 2025, tackled a smaller slice of the same problem: misleading labeling. The law requires digital storefronts to disclose clearly when a customer is buying a revocable license rather than acquiring the product outright, specifically targeting the use of words like “buy” or “purchase” for transactions that can be revoked by the seller.
The distinction between AB 2426 and the Power To The Players Act matters for anyone trying to gauge how far this fight could go. California’s law is a disclosure rule. It forces honesty about what a customer is getting, but it does not convert a license into ownership, and it does not require publishers to keep a game playable after a server shutdown. The Power To The Players Act, by contrast, would attempt to change the substance of the transaction itself, not just the label attached to it. That is a much heavier legal lift, and it is why industry attorneys are likely to scrutinize the FTC’s authority to compel it closely if a bill text ever surfaces.
It also means AB 2426 offers a preview of the easier, more defensible path a federal version of this fight might take if the ownership mandate stalls: force clearer labeling nationwide, even if full ownership rights remain out of reach.
The shutdown cases that built the case for Torres
Legislation like this doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It follows a string of incidents where paying customers lost access to games they had already bought, each one adding to a public record that Torres’ office and gaming outlets have cited while covering the announcement.
Ubisoft’s The Crew is the case most frequently invoked in this debate. The publisher shut down the online racing game’s servers in 2024 and revoked licenses outright, leaving buyers with an unplayable copy of a game they had paid full price for since it depended entirely on server connectivity. Players pursued legal action afterward, arguing the shutdown broke reasonable consumer expectations about what a purchase entails.
Velan Studios’ Knockout City shut its official servers in 2023, though the developer later released a self-hosted PC build that let players keep going through private servers. Console owners got no equivalent option, which is often cited as a case study in uneven preservation outcomes depending on platform. Square Enix and PlatinumGames pulled the plug on Babylon’s Fall in 2023, less than a year after launch, ending the only way most players could access the game’s core content. And Sony’s Concord is the starkest example on record: the game was pulled from sale and its servers shut down in September 2024, within days of release, with refunds issued to buyers. The refunds limited the direct financial damage, but the episode still demonstrated how fast a paid product can vanish entirely.
Separately, Sony’s own terms of service have drawn scrutiny for stating in plain language that PlayStation Store purchases do not confer ownership of the underlying game, a point covered in detail in an earlier Tech-Insider report on Sony’s 50-page terms of service. That kind of fine print is exactly what Torres’ three-part ownership, play, and transfer framework is aimed at overriding.
Stop Killing Games crossed a European threshold first
The Power To The Players Act isn’t happening in a vacuum internationally, either. The Stop Killing Games campaign, a European Citizens’ Initiative demanding that publishers leave purchased games in a usable state after official support ends, reported reaching 1,294,188 verified signatures across EU and UK petitions, according to coverage that tied the figure to the Torres announcement. That figure cleared the signature threshold needed to trigger a formal response from the European Commission.
Clearing that threshold is a procedural milestone, not a law. The Commission is now obligated to examine the initiative and respond formally, but a response can range from a legislative proposal to a simple explanation of why the Commission won’t act. Still, the overlap between what Stop Killing Games is demanding in Europe and what the Power To The Players Act proposes for offline-mode requirements in the US is close enough that advocates on both sides of the Atlantic are likely to point to each other’s progress as momentum.
The EU’s existing consumer protection architecture, including its Digital Content and Digital Services Directive and its Consumer Rights Directive, already covers conformity, remedies, and update obligations for digital content. None of those existing rules force a publisher to keep servers running indefinitely or turn a license into transferable ownership, which is precisely the gap Stop Killing Games and, in its own way, the Power To The Players Act are both trying to close.
Why physical media’s decline raised the stakes
Part of why this debate has intensified is structural, and The Independent connected the timing to console-side frustration over upcoming releases: fewer games ship on a disc you can resell, lend, or keep playing offline forever once a company walks away. As physical sales shrink across the industry relative to digital downloads, the practical consequence is that more of a player’s library exists only as a licensed entry in a storefront account, dependent on the seller’s continued cooperation rather than possession of a physical object. Tech-Insider has tracked how collectors and modders are already treating physical discs as an endangered format worth fighting over, including a case where a leak group explicitly threatened to target physical disc builds as leverage, a sign of how much symbolic weight a disc still carries even as its market share fades.
Storefronts that never sold a disc in the first place sit at the center of this fight too. Platforms built around DRM-free distribution have positioned themselves as the alternative to the license model Torres is targeting, a contrast Tech-Insider examined in its comparison of Steam’s cut-based model against GOG’s DRM-free ownership pitch. If the Power To The Players Act ever becomes binding, DRM-free storefronts would have the least retooling to do, since they already sell something closer to the ownership model the bill demands.
How the ownership fight compares across jurisdictions
| Measure | Jurisdiction | Status as of Oct. 19, 2026 | Core requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power To The Players Act | United States (federal) | Announced Oct. 15, 2026; not formally introduced | FTC rules requiring ownership, playability, and transfer rights |
| AB 2426 | California | Signed 2024; in effect since Jan. 1, 2025 | Clear disclosure when a sale is actually a revocable license |
| Stop Killing Games | European Union / UK | 1,294,188 signatures reported; Commission response pending | Publishers must leave purchased games in a usable state after support ends |
| Digital Content and Digital Services Directive | European Union | In force | Conformity, update, and remedy obligations for digital content sellers |
| Consumer Rights Directive | European Union | In force | Information duties and withdrawal rights for digital contracts |
Shutdown cases that shaped the policy debate
| Game | Publisher/Developer | Shutdown year | Outcome for buyers |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Crew | Ubisoft | 2024 | Servers shut down, licenses revoked, game rendered unplayable; legal action followed |
| Knockout City | Velan Studios | 2023 | Official servers closed; self-hosted PC version released, console players left without an equivalent option |
| Babylon’s Fall | Square Enix / PlatinumGames | 2023 | Online-dependent core content became inaccessible less than a year after launch |
| Concord | Sony | 2024 | Pulled from sale and shut down days after release; refunds issued to buyers |
The industry’s likely response
The Entertainment Software Association has historically represented publishers and platform holders in opposition to measures that would impose broad new ownership, resale, or offline-play mandates. The trade group’s recurring arguments in past fights have centered on the claim that digital games are licensed services rather than conventional goods, that online functionality carries ongoing server, security, and moderation costs that publishers can’t be forced to fund forever, and that mandatory offline modes may be technically impossible for titles architected entirely around server-side systems.
No directly attributable statement from the ESA responding specifically to the October 15 announcement has been confirmed in reporting available as of this writing, so any claim that the ESA has already taken a formal position on the Power To The Players Act should be treated as unverified. What is predictable, based on the trade group’s history, is that any formal bill text will draw pushback on the offline-mode mandate in particular, since that requirement would apply retroactively to live-service architecture that many studios never designed with an offline fallback in mind.
What a real FTC rulemaking process would involve
Even assuming Torres formally introduces the bill and it passes, the mechanism matters. Directing the FTC to write rules is not the same as the rules already existing. The FTC would need to open a rulemaking docket, solicit public comment, likely hold hearings with publisher and consumer-advocacy input, and publish a final rule that could itself be challenged in court before taking effect. That process routinely takes one to several years for agencies handling less contentious subject matter, and a rule touching core revenue mechanics for a global entertainment industry would almost certainly draw litigation over the FTC’s statutory authority to compel it.
That timeline is the single most important fact missing from most coverage of this announcement. Readers searching for what this means for their current game library should understand that nothing changes immediately, and that even a favorable outcome is measured in years, not weeks.
Predictions: where this goes from here
- Expect Torres or an ally to formally introduce bill text within the current congressional session, likely trimmed to focus on the offline-mode requirement rather than a full ownership mandate, since that’s the more legally defensible piece.
- Watch for other states to introduce AB 2426-style disclosure bills before any federal ownership mandate gains traction, since disclosure requirements face a lower constitutional bar than converting licenses into property rights.
- The European Commission’s formal response to Stop Killing Games will likely arrive before any US bill clears committee, giving American advocates a concrete comparison point to cite in testimony.
- Publishers with heavily server-dependent live-service titles are likely to lobby hardest against the offline-mode requirement specifically, since it is the provision with the clearest technical and financial cost.
- Expect more individual shutdown incidents, following the pattern of The Crew, Knockout City, Babylon’s Fall, and Concord, to be cited in future congressional hearings as evidence, regardless of whether this specific bill advances.
Why this matters beyond gamers
As Moneywise noted in its coverage of the proposal, the license-versus-ownership question Torres is raising extends well past video games. Ebooks, digital movies, software subscriptions, and increasingly even smart-home devices operate on the same licensing logic that lets a company revoke access after a sale. A successful FTC rulemaking built around video games could become the template regulators reach for in adjacent digital goods markets, which is part of why this proposal is drawing attention from consumer-rights groups well outside the gaming press.
It’s also a test of how much appetite Washington has for intervening in digital marketplace design at all, at a moment when antitrust and AI regulation are already competing for the same congressional and FTC bandwidth. Whether the Power To The Players Act gets real legislative attention or quietly stalls will say something about where consumer-ownership rights rank against those other priorities heading into 2027.
Frequently asked questions
Has the Power To The Players Act become law?
No. As of October 19, 2026, the bill had not been formally introduced in Congress, according to available reporting. It remains an announced legislative proposal, not an enacted law.
Who introduced the Power To The Players Act?
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat representing New York’s 15th congressional district, announced the proposal on October 15, 2026.
What would the bill require if it passed?
It would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules ensuring that buying a video game confers ownership rather than a revocable license, and requiring an offline mode for online-dependent games before servers are shut down.
How is this different from California’s AB 2426?
AB 2426 only requires clearer disclosure when a digital purchase is actually a license, effective since January 1, 2025. It does not grant ownership or require preservation of server-dependent games. The Power To The Players Act aims for the substantive right itself, not just better labeling.
What is the Stop Killing Games campaign?
It’s a European Citizens’ Initiative that reported reaching 1,294,188 verified signatures demanding publishers leave purchased games playable after official support ends. It cleared the threshold requiring a formal European Commission response, though that response does not guarantee new legislation.
Which games are cited as examples of the problem?
Reporting on the proposal has pointed to Ubisoft’s The Crew, Velan Studios’ Knockout City, Square Enix and PlatinumGames’ Babylon’s Fall, and Sony’s Concord as examples of paid games that became unplayable after server shutdowns.
Has the Entertainment Software Association responded to the bill?
No directly attributable statement from the ESA specifically addressing the October 15 announcement has been confirmed in available reporting. Any claim otherwise should be treated as unverified.
How long would an FTC rule actually take to implement?
Even if the bill passed, the FTC would need to open a rulemaking docket, take public comment, and finalize a rule, a process that typically spans one to several years for agencies and would likely face legal challenges from affected publishers.
