The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its release, 2K Games confirmed it’s already pulling the plug on it. The game will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30. By January 1, 2027, online servers will go offline as well, making it impossible to play the most popular modes. A game millions paid $70 for will become mostly useless. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres wants to change that.
“I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it,” Torres told Kotaku in a phone interview this week. To make that the law of the land, the U.S. representative for New York’s 15th congressional district since 2021 plans to introduce legislation in Congress called the Power To The Players Act. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create regulations protecting ownership rights for video games. Companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down.
The broad strokes of the legislation are essentially what many gamers have spent the last year begging for. That movement began with the Stop Killing Games advocacy group calling for companies to stop selling games that can be rendered completely unplayable when online support ends, and caught additional momentum over this past summer with the news that Sony will end production on PlayStation discs for its next console generation, seemingly forcing everyone who buys a PS6 to go all-digital. Players are getting a preview of that future next month when Grand Theft Auto 6 releases as just a download code in a box, giving fans no control over a purchase that starts at $80.
“Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy,” Torres said in a press release. “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. Families in the Bronx and across the country save up to buy these games, and they deserve better than a license that can vanish at any time. The Power To The Players Act ensures consumers own what they buy and can keep playing long after a company moves on.”
While more and more gamers are calling for regulation to protect game ownership rights in an all-digital future, the devil will be in the details and the big publishers are likely to lobby hard against any restrictions on how they make or sell games. The legislation needs to be formally introduced in Congress, where it will then make its way through the long and arduous committee process. Torres did not confirm if the bill will have any cosponsors or whether any of his Republican colleagues will sign on to support it. Faith in Congress remains at all-time lows. An estimated 87 percent of legislation never even gets put to a full vote.
While Torres confirmed he’s not one of the millions who bought NBA 2K25, he said he grew up gaming with franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil, and SOCOM. At age 38, he’s also nearly 20 years younger than the median member of the House, most of whom were born before Pong was released. Torres said rather than some radical transformation of video game ownership, his bill would be a “restoration to the historical norm” of buying and playing games that existed all the way through the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. He also called it an “affordability issue” as prices rise across the economy.
The Power To The Players Act noticeably leaves out other types of digital media like movies and music, though Terminator 2 and a bunch of other movie purchases were ripped from people’s digital libraries earlier this year. Torres suggested that’s because of the unique relationship people have to owning, collecting, and investing their time into gaming, but that if successful, he thinks the bill could be a model for codifying other digital media rights. “I hope we can set a precedent that will be followed elsewhere in the digital economy,” he said.