A Proposed Bill Would Make Gamers Own Their Games, Not Just License Them

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) announced on October 15, 2026 that he plans to introduce the Power to the Players Act, legislation intended to protect ownership of purchased video games. The announcement was posted by his House office House announcement.

The bill has not been introduced. At the time of the announcement it existed as a stated proposal, not as filed legislative text before Congress Engadget.

As described, the bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations protecting ownership of purchased video games. It would not write store license terms or server rules directly into statute. It would delegate to the FTC to define protections through regulation.

The proposal describes two requirements. First, players would own games rather than license them. Second, companies would have to offer an offline mode if a game's servers are taken down Engadget.

Torres framed the first point as a return to prior practice. He said enforcing the protections would restore the historical norm from before games were sold primarily digitally. He also said that "consumers must have the right to own, play, and transfer the games they buy" Kotaku.

Torres suggested the approach could extend beyond games. The protections, as described in the announcement coverage, could inspire similar protections for digitally purchased books, movies and music Engadget.

The broader context here is how ownership works today. Buying usually means a license tied to your account, a revocable permission slip governed by an end user license agreement. That agreement defines purchase as a perpetual or limited right to access software and services. A legal definition of ownership, plus an explicit right to transfer, raises direct questions about resale, gifting, account migration, and preservation after a storefront or publisher shutdown. None of those mechanics are specified in the announcement.

The technical challenge becomes clear with the offline requirement. Many titles split work between the player device and company servers for authentication, entitlement checks, matchmaking, saving progress, anti-cheat, and content delivery. Think of it like a hybrid car that needs both gas and battery systems to run. A compliant offline fallback would need to behave reliably when those services are unreachable, with a clean separation between local progression and server-controlled game state. For single-player games with online checks, that is largely packaging and login work. For multiplayer-centric or server-simulated titles, it implies maintaining a parallel playable build.

In my view, the choice of the FTC as rulemaking venue is practical because technical details change quickly. Login flows, DRM copy-protection schemes, and shutdown practices can evolve without amending a statute. The debate will then focus on definitions engineers care about: what counts as a purchased game, what counts as taken down, and what counts as an offline mode that preserves ownership in practice. The announcement does not answer those questions, and any draft text will need to.

Looking ahead, if those definitions land in workable form, players and archivists gain durable access to paid software independent of backend longevity. For developers, it creates reason to design shutdowns early, with local fallbacks and data export treated as part of shipping rather than end-of-life triage.