Power To The Players Act forces offline modes before shutdowns

The Power To The Players Act would tell the Federal Trade Commission, the US consumer protection agency, to write new rules protecting players’ ability to own and play the games they buy. Torres announced it on October 15.

His office has described three rights at the heart of the plan:

• The right to own: paying for a game gives you the game, not just a license to play it.
• The right to play: games with online features must get an offline mode before their supporting servers shut down.
• The right to transfer: you should be able to pass on a game you bought.

Torres put it bluntly in his statement, calling a game that can be taken away a rental disguised as a sale. In a phone interview he said the rule should be simple: if you pay for it, you own it. He framed the bill as a return to the way games worked from the 1980s through the 2000s, and also as an affordability issue for families who save up for new releases.

The bill covers video games only, not films or music. Torres said he hopes it sets a precedent for the rest of the digital economy.

NBA 2K25 shows the problem in one game. Publisher 2K said it would pull the title from digital stores on October 30 and fully discontinue it on December 31. After that date, every online mode goes away, and that includes MyCareer and MyTeam, which many people play alone but which depend on 2K’s servers.

Owners can still redownload the game and play offline afterward. 2K confirmed that Play Now, MyNBA, The W and MyWNBA will keep working once the servers are gone. But players won’t be able to earn or buy any more virtual currency, and the modes people sink the most hours into will be locked.

The game sold for $69.99, or $99.99 for the All-Star Edition. Two years of full use is roughly the pattern for the series: NBA 2K24 was discontinued on January 31 of this year, and NBA 2K23 went dark a year before that. Under Torres’s plan, a shutdown like this would need an offline path for the parts people paid for.

For now, nothing changes. The Power To The Players Act is a proposal, so the games you buy this week follow the same license terms as last week.

If it passes in a strong form, the change would be real. A publisher ending support would have to leave behind a version you can still run, instead of switching off modes that only work online. Being able to transfer a game could also bring back something like the used-game market, which is shrinking as digital sales take over. Sony’s own figures show digital downloads made up 82 percent of full-game unit sales across PS4 and PS5 in its last fiscal year, and Sony plans to phase out physical PlayStation games in 2028.

There are limits worth knowing. Passing the bill would not make every digital game freely resellable like an old disc. And until the text is published, nobody knows whether the offline rule would cover updates and add-ons, or only the game as it existed when you bought it.

A practical step today: before you pay full price for a game that leans on online features, check whether its main modes need a server. Sports games with yearly releases are the most likely to lose features after about two years.

Making an old game playable offline isn’t always a switch someone can flip. Some titles rely on online systems for basic functions, use licensed content with time limits, or were never built to run without a company server. Sports games carry many real players, teams and brands, which can bring licensing and legal requirements of their own.

Publishers are likely to argue that keeping every game running forever is costly or simply impractical. Any final law will have to weigh that against the idea that people should keep what they paid for. Torres has not said whether the bill has cosponsors or any Republican support.

The next step is formal introduction in the House, followed by committee work, where the real wording gets settled. Watch for the published text, which will define what counts as an offline mode and whether a transfer right covers digital stores.

The idea is also moving in the states. In California, the Protect Our Games Act, AB 1921, cleared the Assembly Appropriations Committee in May by 11 votes to 2, despite lobbying against it by the Entertainment Software Association. It would require 60 days’ notice before a game’s services end, then a patch, an alternate version or a refund. Pennsylvania state senator John Kane has filed a bill of the same name that gives companies a choice of an offline mode, a server-free online mode or a refund of at least 25%.

All of these efforts draw on the Stop Killing Games campaign, which pushes publishers to stop selling games that become unplayable once support ends. A federal bill would raise that fight to Congress for the first time.