US Congressman Ritchie Torres is preparing to introduce the Power to the Players Act, a bill that would grant gamers full legal ownership of digital games and force publishers to keep titles playable after servers shut down.

The bill sets out three concrete proposals:

• Grant gamers the right to fully own digital versions of games, rather than hold revocable licenses.
• Allow resale and transfer of purchased digital games.
• Require companies to preserve access to games after they discontinue server support.

Torres argues the current model is fundamentally unfair. When gamers buy a title today, they often receive not the game itself but a license to use it — a license publishers can revoke at any moment. The problem sharpens when a company discontinues support for a title and strips buyers of the ability to keep playing something they paid for.

If Congress passes the bill, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would have to write the corresponding regulations. That puts the enforcement burden on the same agency already policing digital marketplace practices, and it means the practical shape of "ownership" would emerge from an FTC rulemaking process rather than the statute itself.

What would change for publishers and platforms?

The short answer: quite a lot, if it survives contact with lobbyists. Full ownership rights for digital copies would undercut the license-first architecture that Steam, the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Store and Nintendo's eShop all run on. A resale and transfer right would be more disruptive still — secondhand digital markets would require new infrastructure, new pricing logic and almost certainly new friction with platform holders who take a cut of every first sale.

The server-shutdown clause lands hardest on live-service publishers. Under the bill, killing a game's servers couldn't simply kill the game. Companies would face a legal obligation to leave buyers with a playable product, whether through offline patches, community-server handoffs or some other mechanism the FTC ends up defining.

Does this bill have a track record to build on?

Not a encouraging one, domestically at least. The initiative echoes the European movement Stop Killing Games, which campaigns for the preservation of online games. That movement's creators previously contributed to another US bill — the Protect Our Games Act — which Congress eventually rejected.

So Torres is pitching a broader version of an idea that has already failed once in Washington. The difference in scope matters: where the Protect Our Games Act addressed game preservation, the Power to the Players Act adds ownership and resale to the mix. Whether that breadth helps it build a coalition or simply multiplies the industries opposed to it is the open question.

What happens next?

The bill hasn't been formally introduced yet — Torres is still preparing it. Once it drops, watch two things: whether it picks up co-sponsors, and how the ESA and major platform holders respond. A rejected predecessor suggests an uphill climb. But the FTC rulemaking provision means that even a watered-down version could set a real precedent for how digital ownership gets defined in the US market.