Power To The Players Act: You'd Own Games, Not Licenses

What the Power To The Players Act actually says

The bill does not write ownership rules itself. It tells the Federal Trade Commission to write them.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, who represents New York's 15th district in the Bronx, introduced the Power To The Players Act this week. According to The Verge, the text directs the FTC to establish regulations that guarantee consumers own a game when they pay for it, rather than receiving a license to play it.

The second half is the part publishers will hate. Developers would have to build an offline mode before shutting down the servers a game depends on. That targets the slow death most online games suffer: the store listing disappears, the servers go dark, and the copy you paid for becomes a file that opens to an error screen.

Torres pointed at NBA 2K25 as the recent example. 2K is delisting the game at the end of this month and shutting its servers down on December 31st, which guts its playability. His statement was blunt: "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."

Ownership, resale and the Steam problem

If the bill becomes law, the license agreement behind every storefront purchase gets harder to defend.

Every digital purchase you have made on Steam, the PlayStation Store or the Microsoft Store is a license. The fine print says so, and it is why storefronts can revoke access, delist titles or shut down a backend without refunding anyone. Torres's bill would push the FTC toward treating that transaction as a sale with the rights a sale normally carries.

That raises questions the bill does not answer yet. Does ownership include resale, the way a disc could be sold to a friend or a used-game shop? Does it include transfer between accounts? The Verge notes that concerns about playing, reselling and transferring games have been building for a while, and the bill's language leaves the FTC to sort out the mechanics.

The timing is not accidental. Sony has said it plans to phase out physical game discs in 2028, which would remove the last simple way to own something you can hand to another person. Microsoft's disc-to-digital program already showed how thin the line is: trade in the disc and the license tied to it can be revoked. Ownership rules would land directly on top of that model.

Where it stands in Congress

Introduced, not passed. That is the whole status.

A bill being introduced is the first step of many, and most never become law. There is no vote, no committee markup and no companion bill in the Senate reported yet. The FTC would also have to draft the actual rules, which would then face a public comment period and almost certainly a legal challenge from publishers.

The bill is not alone, either. Pennsylvania State Sen. John Kane introduced the Protect Our Games Act, which would require an offline mode, an online mode independent of the company's servers, or a minimum 25 percent refund when a game is sunset. State-level pressure plus a federal bill is how these arguments usually start moving.

For now, treat this as a signal rather than a rule change. Nothing about your Steam library or your console purchases has changed today.

What it means for you

If you buy games in the US, UK or EU, nothing changes yet. The bill is US federal legislation, so even if it passed it would bind companies selling into the American market, and EU consumer law already leans harder against license-only language than US law does.

The practical effect, if it ever lands, would be an offline mode you can rely on after a publisher walks away, and clearer rules on whether you can resell or transfer a digital purchase. Until then, buying on a storefront still means renting with extra steps.

The Power To The Players Act is a statement of intent with a long road ahead, but it names the problem precisely: the gap between what a storefront button says and what the license actually grants. Whether or not this bill survives, that gap is now a congressional topic, and publishers will have to answer for it.