A game that stops working because a company flipped a switch is not a product you bought. It is a service you subscribed to, with the subscription price paid up front. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY-15) put that argument into federal legislation this month, and the industry has not finished reacting.
On October 15, Torres announced the Power To The Players Act, a bill that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write regulations protecting consumers' ability to own and play the video games they purchase. Two things stand out in the announcement. First, buying a game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a revocable license to play it. Second, games with online functionality would be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down.
The Verge reported the introduction on October 18, adding that the bill arrives one week after Sony confirmed plans to phase out physical game discs in 2028. Coverage kept rolling through the weekend: PCMag Australia updated its story on October 19, and Singapore's Business Times ran an analysis of whether the bill could stop another NBA 2K25-style shutdown.
The bill, its example, and its deadlines
Torres chose his exhibit carefully. NBA 2K25 retailed for $69.99 in its standard edition and $99.99 in its All-Star Edition, shipped on September 6, 2024, and is scheduled to be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30, 2026, with online servers closing on December 31, 2026. That is a total commercial and functional lifespan of roughly 26 months for a game bought at full 2024 premium pricing.
"Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy," Torres said in the announcement. "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." Speaking to Kotaku, he framed the proposal more plainly: if you pay for it, you own it, which he called a restoration of the historical norm of the 1990s.
The dates in the press release are worth sitting with, because they show how compressed the window has become:
| Event | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|
| NBA 2K25 release | September 6, 2024 | PCMag |
| Bill announced by Rep. Torres | October 15, 2026 | Torres press release |
| Delisting from digital storefronts | October 30, 2026 | Torres press release |
| Online servers shut down | December 31, 2026 | Torres press release |
| Total playable-to-purchasable window | ~26 months | Computed from the dates above |
The legislative context matters too. The bill grows directly out of the Stop Killing Games movement, which launched after Ubisoft shut down the 2014 racer The Crew and pushed a European Citizens' Initiative that required one million signatures to force a formal response. That effort stalled in June 2026, when the European Commission declined to propose a playability mandate and instead offered to negotiate a voluntary code of conduct with publishers. A comparable state bill, the Protect Our Games Act introduced by Pennsylvania State Sen. John Kane, died in a California Senate committee in June, though the same committee voted unanimously to reconsider it, with a possible return in 2027.
Why This Matters: offline mode is a systems problem, not a checkbox
Here is where a software engineer has to push on the language. "Provide an offline mode before shutting down servers" sounds like a settings toggle. In practice, it means shipping a self-contained build whose behavior survives without the backend that defined it, and modern live-service games are not shaped that way.
Consider where state actually lives in a 2026-era online game. Entitlement checks run against account services at launch. Matchmaking, leaderboards, and progression sit on authoritative servers. Microtransaction stores, loot-table rotations, and event calendars are server-side configuration, which is precisely why publishers can retune monetization without shipping a patch. Anti-cheat attests client integrity through a live handshake. The client is, in a real sense, a thin renderer over a distributed system the player never owns and cannot inspect.
Delivering an offline mode therefore requires re-implementing the authoritative logic locally: local entitlement handling that cannot phone home, a substitute for matchmaking or its removal, progression state migrated to the device, and any gameplay that assumed server configuration frozen into the build. That is not a patch, it is a second product, staffed for months, on a title the publisher has already decided is no longer commercially worth staffing. This is exactly the labor that private-server communities and decompilation projects perform voluntarily, work that publishers spend millions to prevent and that, as Business Times noted, AI-assisted decompilation tools are making cheaper by the month. The bill would effectively demand that studios do in-house, on a deadline, what those communities do as a hobby.
Notice how the Pennsylvania companion bill prices this exact uncertainty. Sen. Kane's Protect Our Games Act offers three exits: an offline mode, an online mode that does not depend on the company's servers, or a minimum 25 percent refund when a title is sunset. Lawwriters included a monetary escape hatch because they understood, explicitly, that for some architectures the engineering answer is "not feasible." Torres's federal version, as announced, centers the mandate. The full text of the bill was not publicly available at the time of writing, so the presence or absence of a similar off-ramp is unconfirmed, and Business Times made the same caveat: without the text, enforceability cannot be assessed.
The economics the bill is really negotiating
From a data scientist's angle, the fight is about which side of the ledger holds the sunk cost. In a boxed-goods market, the publisher's revenue event and the consumer's ownership event coincide at the sale. In a live-service model, revenue is a curve spread across seasons, and delisting is a rational move: NBA 2K25 delists eleven months before NBA 2K27 would want the shelf, the roster license it carries expires on a schedule, and every server kept running past profitability is pure cost. The shutdown calendar is not negligence, it is the business model executing as designed.
Sony's own numbers show how little physical media is left to fall back on. In its latest earnings report, digital downloads accounted for 82 percent of full-game unit sales across PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and the company plans to stop shipping PlayStation games on disc entirely in 2028. A remedy that worked in 1998, the shelf copy, is being removed from the market at the same moment Congress debates the right to keep what is on it. Even the analogies leak: a disc still fails if the game demands a server handshake, and patches can make the final online state unrecognizable from what shipped.
The regulatory mechanism is also a design choice worth reading closely. The bill does not write the playability rule itself; it directs the FTC to establish regulations. That moves the hard technical questions, what counts as an offline mode, which server dependencies qualify, what retrofit effort is proportional, into an agency rulemaking with a record, comments, and industry lobbying. Good outcome: engineers and consumer advocates get to put feasibility evidence on the record. Bad outcome: rulemakings take years, and the next NBA 2K delisting will not wait.
Outlook
Realistically, this bill is a signal, not a statute. It has a long path: committee, floor votes, the Senate, and it faces an industry whose platform holders have been converging on digital-only distribution for a decade. The June 2026 European Commission decision is the cautionary precedent, a mandate declined in favor of a voluntary code. But the comparison point has shifted since then. Sony's disc phase-out gives the ownership question a hard expiration date, Take-Two, the publisher of the exhibit game, is simultaneously litigating over leaked material in ways that keep it in tech policy headlines, and a second jurisdiction, Pennsylvania, has already drafted the refund compromise that a federal committee can copy rather than invent.
For builders, the practical takeaway is architectural. If you ship anything that depends on your servers to function after the sale, assume your product's post-support lifecycle is now a compliance question in at least three jurisdictions, not just an operations decision. Design the offline degradation path while the backend is alive, keep authoritative logic inspectable, and treat "it stops working when we stop" as the liability that a $69.99 price point can no longer quietly absorb. Our read: the version of this law that eventually passes, somewhere, will look like the Pennsylvania template, offline mode when feasible, a defined refund when not, because the engineering reality forces the compromise. What to watch for is the FTC's technical definition of "offline mode," since that single phrase will decide whether the law costs studios a settings screen or a rewrite.
The games press will cover the next shutdown either way. The interesting question is whether the next one ships its own offline build on the way out. For how quickly even well-funded live games can fall over, see our earlier breakdown of why Riot ended 2XKO's active development, and for the platform strategy that makes discs look like a rounding error, our look at Xbox Labs and the push into new distribution.