Power To The Players Act: 3 Rights, 0 Bill Number [2026]

A New York congressman wants to settle a fight that gamers have been losing for a decade: do you actually own the games you buy? On October 15, 2026, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) announced the Power To The Players Act, a proposed federal bill that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to treat a video game purchase as ownership rather than a revocable license, and to require publishers to keep purchased games playable offline after they pull the plug on servers. The announcement landed three days before this report and has already pulled the long-running Stop Killing Games movement out of state legislatures and Brussels committee rooms and into Washington.

The timing matters. Gamers have watched Ubisoft shutter The Crew, Sony’s PlayStation Store terms spell out in plain language that a purchase buys access rather than a copy, and a California bill built on the same complaint die in the state Senate earlier this year. Torres’ bill is the first attempt to take the fight national, and it arrives with no bill number, no confirmed cosponsors, and no FTC rulemaking timeline yet attached. What it does have is a clear target: the fine print that turns a $70 game purchase into a license Valve, Microsoft, Sony, and every major publisher can revoke whenever they choose.

What the Power To The Players Act Actually Requires

According to Torres’ own office, the Power To The Players Act rests on three pillars. First, buying a video game would legally count as a transfer of ownership rather than the grant of a license, closing the loophole that lets publishers describe a $60 purchase as a revocable permission slip. Second, any game that depends on online servers would need to ship with, or later receive, an offline mode before the publisher is allowed to shut those servers down. Third, the bill would preserve a buyer’s ability to transfer or resell a game they purchased, a right that digital storefronts have quietly erased over the past fifteen years.

The bill, as announced, directs the Federal Trade Commission to write the actual regulations that enforce those three principles rather than spelling out every technical requirement in the statute itself. That is a common structure for consumer-protection legislation, but it also means a lot of the details that matter to developers and platform holders, things like how much advance notice a shutdown requires, what counts as an acceptable offline patch, and whether publishers of server-dependent multiplayer games get an exemption, are not yet public. Torres’ office has not released bill text, a formal number, or a list of cosponsors as of this reporting, according to coverage from Tom’s Hardware.

That gap between announcement and legislative text is not unusual in Congress, where lawmakers routinely unveil a proposal’s goals before filing the formal draft. But it leaves a wide-open question for anyone covering the gaming industry: is this a serious legislative push with staff already drafting language, or a press-friendly statement designed to pressure publishers without the heavy lift of actually passing a law? Torres’ track record on tech policy, and the attention the announcement has already drawn from outlets across the gaming press, suggests his office intends to follow through, even if passage in a divided Congress is a separate question entirely.

Why Rep. Ritchie Torres Is Pushing This Now

Torres framed the bill around a simple consumer complaint rather than a technical argument about server economics. “When you pay for a game, you should own it,” Torres said, according to Ars Technica. That one-line framing is deliberate. It sidesteps the industry’s usual defense, that live-service games cost real money to keep running and that server shutdowns are a business necessity, and instead asks why the sale was ever marketed as a purchase in the first place.

Torres went further in describing what the bill is meant to fix. “Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy,” he said, according to Dexerto. Those three rights map directly onto the bill’s three provisions: ownership instead of licensing, offline access instead of a dead server, and resale instead of a storefront account that can’t be transferred. Torres also took direct aim at the industry’s current model, arguing that “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,” per the same Dexerto report.

That rhetoric lands at a moment when the Stop Killing Games movement has already built a global audience, even without a legislative win to show for it. Torres is effectively picking up a fight that consumer advocates in Europe and California started, and moving it to a venue, federal regulation enforced by the FTC, that neither of the earlier efforts used.

The FTC’s New Role in Policing Game Ownership

Handing enforcement to the FTC is the part of this bill that platform holders will watch most closely. The commission already polices deceptive marketing and unfair business practices broadly, and a rule requiring game publishers to disclose and honor ownership terms would fold neatly into that existing authority rather than creating a brand-new regulatory body. That is also precisely why the bill’s lack of detail matters. Without published text, nobody outside Torres’ office yet knows whether the FTC would gain new statutory rulemaking power, use an existing consumer-protection authority, or whether violations would trigger civil penalties, a private right of action for consumers, or simply formal warnings.

Those unanswered questions are the difference between a bill that reshapes how Steam, the Xbox Store, and the PlayStation Store write their terms of service, and one that publishers can route around with minor label changes. An FTC rule with real penalties attached would force platform holders to rewrite purchase language across every storefront. A rule without enforcement teeth would mostly generate press coverage and leave the underlying licensing structure untouched.

Torres summarized the bill’s intent in a statement reported by TechPowerUp: “The Power To The Players Act ensures consumers own what they buy and can keep playing long after a company moves on.” Whether the FTC ends up with the authority to make that happen, rather than just the mandate to try, is the single biggest open question hanging over this proposal.

The Server Shutdown Problem: Ubisoft’s The Crew and Beyond

The case that keeps coming up in coverage of this bill is Ubisoft’s decision to shut down The Crew in 2024, cutting off access to a game that players had already paid for, including its single-player content, because the title depended on always-online servers. Stop Killing Games organizers have cited that shutdown repeatedly as the clearest example of the problem Torres is now trying to legislate against: a purchase that functions perfectly well offline on a technical level, but gets killed anyway because the publisher chose to build in a server dependency that didn’t need to exist.

That precedent is also why the bill’s offline-mode requirement is drawn so specifically. Rather than banning server shutdowns outright, which would be commercially unworkable for genuinely multiplayer-dependent games, the bill as described would require publishers to ship or patch in offline functionality before they’re allowed to cut the servers. For a single-player game with online elements bolted on, like The Crew, that’s a relatively small technical lift. For a game built entirely around live multiplayer matchmaking, it’s a much harder engineering problem, and one the bill’s public description hasn’t yet addressed.

From Stop Killing Games to a Federal Bill: A Movement’s Long Road

Torres’ bill didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the latest chapter in a fight that consumer advocates have been waging across two continents for years, with mixed results so far.

The EU’s Rejected Petition

The Stop Killing Games movement built its biggest show of public support in the European Union, where organizers gathered more than a million signatures on a European Citizens’ Initiative demanding rules against publishers disabling games players had already bought. The European Commission ultimately declined to pursue binding legislation, opting instead to back a voluntary industry code of conduct rather than a legal requirement. That outcome left EU consumers with a symbolic win and little enforceable change, a result that frustrated the same advocates now watching Torres’ proposal with cautious interest.

California’s Failed Senate Bill

California tried a narrower, state-level version of the same fix earlier this year, and it also fell short, failing in a close vote in the state Senate. That defeat came despite California already having passed AB 2426, a narrower 2024 law that took effect in 2025 and requires digital storefronts to disclose clearly when a “buy” button is actually granting a license rather than outright ownership. AB 2426 fixed the labeling problem without touching the underlying right to keep playing after a shutdown, which is exactly the gap Torres’ federal bill is now trying to close at a national level instead of state by state.

How Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Currently Handle Ownership

Every major storefront already tells buyers, somewhere in its terms of service, that a purchase is a license rather than a transfer of ownership. The practical differences show up in refund policy, resale rights, and how each platform has handled shutting games down in the past. Here’s how the four largest PC and console storefronts compare on the exact issues the Power To The Players Act targets.

Platform	Stated purchase terms	Resale/transfer allowed	Offline mode after shutdown
Steam (Valve)	License to access content, not ownership	No resale; account-bound licenses	Not guaranteed; case-by-case
Xbox Store (Microsoft)	License to use software	No resale on digital purchases	Not guaranteed; case-by-case
PlayStation Store (Sony)	License, not purchase of the game itself	No resale on digital purchases	Not guaranteed; case-by-case
Nintendo eShop	License to use software	No resale on digital purchases	Not guaranteed; case-by-case

None of the four platforms currently commits to shipping an offline mode before pulling servers, and none allows a digital purchase to be resold the way a physical disc can change hands at a used-game shop. That uniformity is itself part of Torres’ argument: there’s no competitive pressure pushing any single platform to offer better ownership terms, because every major storefront uses roughly the same license-based language.

Industry Reaction: Mostly Silence, With Players Filling the Gap

What’s notable about the days since the October 15 announcement is who hasn’t spoken up. The Entertainment Software Association, which lobbies on behalf of major publishers in Washington, has not issued a public statement on the bill as of this reporting. Neither Microsoft, Sony, nor Valve has commented. That silence likely reflects standard industry practice of not responding to a bill before it has formal text, rather than indifference, since a vague proposal gives lobbyists little specific language to push back against yet.

Players and consumer advocates have filled that gap instead. Gaming outlets have framed the bill as picking up where Stop Killing Games left off at both the EU and California level, and the reaction across gaming forums and social media has leaned heavily supportive, consistent with the broad public backing the Stop Killing Games petition drew in Europe. Whether that online enthusiasm translates into pressure on individual members of Congress, who tend to hear far more from industry lobbyists than from constituents on niche consumer-tech issues, remains the open question that will determine whether this bill gets real legislative traction or stalls the way California’s did.

The Technical Reality of Mandating an Offline Mode

Engineering an offline mode after the fact is not a uniform problem, and that’s where the bill’s current lack of detail creates the most uncertainty for developers. A single-player game with online leaderboards or cloud saves bolted on can usually be patched to run fully offline with modest work, since the core game logic never depended on a remote server to function. A live-service shooter or MMO built around server-authoritative matchmaking, anti-cheat validation, and persistent world state is a different problem entirely. Stripping out the server dependency for those titles can mean rewriting core systems rather than patching a settings menu.

That distinction is likely to become the central argument publishers make if and when the bill gets formal text. Expect industry pushback to focus less on resisting the ownership-language change, which costs little to implement, and more on carving out exemptions or longer compliance windows for genuinely server-dependent multiplayer titles. The EU’s voluntary code of conduct, reached after the Commission declined binding rules, already leaned in that direction by asking publishers to consider end-of-life planning rather than mandating a specific technical outcome.

Market Impact: Which Business Models Are Most Exposed

No analyst note, investor filing, or platform-holder financial disclosure has addressed the Power To The Players Act directly, and that’s expected for a bill announced three days before this report with no formal text yet filed. But the shape of the exposure is already visible from the business models involved. Publishers that lean heavily on live-service, always-online titles, think persistent multiplayer shooters, racing games with server-based economies, and subscription-tied online worlds, carry the most structural risk if an offline-mode mandate becomes enforceable law. Publishers built around single-player franchises with optional online features face comparatively little disruption, since most of their catalog could already run offline with minor patching.

Platform holders face a second, separate exposure around resale rights. Steam, the Xbox Store, and the PlayStation Store all generate revenue partly from the fact that digital purchases can’t be resold, unlike physical media. A resale requirement, if it survives into enforceable regulation, would introduce a secondhand digital market that none of the major storefronts currently has to compete against. That’s a bigger long-term threat to platform revenue than the offline-mode requirement, even though it has drawn less attention so far in coverage of the bill.

Comparing Ownership Rules Across Jurisdictions

Torres’ bill is the third major attempt in roughly two years to force game publishers to treat digital purchases more like ownership. Here’s how the three efforts compare on scope, enforcement, and current status.

Initiative	Jurisdiction	Core requirement	Enforcement	Status
Stop Killing Games (EU)	European Union	Preserve playable access after server shutdown	None; voluntary code of conduct	Rejected as binding law by European Commission
Stop Killing Games bill	California	End-of-life support requirements for games	State consumer-protection law	Failed 4-3 in state Senate
AB 2426	California	Disclose “license, not purchase” labeling	State consumer-protection law	In effect since 2025
Power To The Players Act	United States (federal)	Ownership, offline mode, transfer/resale rights	Proposed FTC rulemaking	Announced; not yet formally introduced

The pattern across all three prior efforts is consistent: strong public support, weak legislative follow-through. The EU initiative drew well over a million signatures and still produced only a voluntary code. California’s bill had momentum and still lost in committee. Torres’ bill starts from a weaker legislative position than either, since it hasn’t even been formally introduced yet, but it has the structural advantage of pointing to an existing enforcement agency rather than asking for an entirely new legal mechanism.

What Happens Next in Congress

The near-term path for this bill is unglamorous but important: Torres’ office needs to file formal legislative text, recruit cosponsors, and get the bill referred to a committee with jurisdiction, most likely House Energy and Commerce given the FTC’s involvement. None of that has happened yet as of this reporting. Bills introduced by individual members without broad bipartisan cosponsor lists rarely advance far in a divided Congress, and consumer-protection measures aimed at a single industry tend to move slowly even when they enjoy public sympathy, since they compete for floor time against higher-priority legislation.

That doesn’t make the announcement meaningless. Bills that stall in Congress still shape the regulatory conversation, give the FTC political cover to examine the issue under its existing authority, and provide state legislators a federal talking point the next time a Stop Killing Games-style bill comes up in a state capitol. California’s bill failed once, but AB 2426 already passed, showing that incremental versions of this fight can succeed even when the larger ambition doesn’t.

5 Predictions for the Power To The Players Act

Formal bill text arrives within weeks, not days. Torres’ office will likely need to finalize legislative language and secure at least a handful of cosponsors before filing, a process that typically takes several weeks after a public announcement like this one.
The ESA stays quiet until text is public. Expect the Entertainment Software Association and major publishers to hold off on a formal response until there’s specific regulatory language to respond to, rather than reacting to Torres’ general framing.
Live-service exemptions become the central fight. If the bill advances, the loudest industry pushback will target carve-outs for server-dependent multiplayer games, not the ownership-language change itself, which is comparatively cheap for publishers to implement.
State legislatures move faster than Congress. Given how slowly federal consumer-tech bills typically move, expect at least one more state to introduce its own Stop Killing Games-style bill in 2027, building on California’s AB 2426 precedent rather than waiting on Torres’ federal effort.
Platforms quietly clarify refund and shutdown policies regardless of the bill’s fate. Even without new law, the public attention this bill is generating gives Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation an incentive to tighten their own shutdown-notice and refund language to get ahead of regulatory risk.

Why This Debate Keeps Resurfacing

The underlying tension here is not new. Physical game discs could be resold, lent, or played decades after a publisher stopped supporting them, and that durability was part of what buyers expected from a purchase. The shift to digital storefronts over the past fifteen years quietly rewrote that deal, replacing a physical object with a revocable license, without most buyers noticing the terms had changed until a shutdown made the difference concrete. Ubisoft’s handling of The Crew turned that abstract fine print into a visible, widely shared grievance, and it’s the single incident that both the EU petition and Torres’ bill keep returning to as their clearest example.

Torres’ bill is also arriving at a moment when live-service game design, subscription-based access, and cloud-dependent titles have made the server-shutdown problem more common rather than less. Every major publisher now ships at least some titles that depend on always-online infrastructure, which means the population of games vulnerable to a sudden shutdown has only grown since the EU petition first gathered steam.

Frequently Asked Questions

Has the Power To The Players Act actually been introduced in Congress?
No. As of this reporting, Rep. Ritchie Torres’ office has announced the bill’s goals but has not filed formal legislative text, assigned a bill number, or confirmed cosponsors.

What would the bill change for Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation users?
As described, it would require the FTC to treat game purchases as ownership rather than a license, mandate offline modes before servers shut down, and preserve the ability to transfer or resell purchased games.

Which agency would enforce the bill?
The Federal Trade Commission, which would be directed to write the specific regulations implementing the bill’s three core principles.

Is this the same as the EU’s Stop Killing Games initiative?
It shares the same goal but uses a different mechanism. The EU initiative was a citizens’ petition that the European Commission ultimately declined to turn into binding law, backing a voluntary code of conduct instead. Torres’ bill would use federal legislation and FTC rulemaking rather than a petition process.

Did California already pass a similar law?
California passed AB 2426, a narrower 2024 law requiring digital storefronts to disclose “license, not purchase” labeling, which took effect in 2025. A broader Stop Killing Games-style bill in California failed in a 4-3 state Senate vote earlier in 2026.

What triggered this renewed push for game ownership legislation?
Ubisoft’s 2024 shutdown of The Crew, which cut off access to a game players had already purchased, including its single-player content, remains the example most frequently cited by advocates and lawmakers pushing for ownership protections.

Have Microsoft, Sony, or Valve responded to the bill?
No public statement from any major platform holder or from the Entertainment Software Association had been issued as of this reporting.

What happens if the bill never gets a floor vote?
Even without passage, the proposal adds pressure on platform holders to clarify refund and shutdown policies, and it gives state legislators a federal reference point for future versions of Stop Killing Games-style bills.