Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY-15) has introduced the Power To The Players Act, a bill that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations ensuring consumers actually own the digital video games they purchase. The bill targets the widening gap between what consumers believe they're buying and what publishers' terms of service actually grant them. The core mechanism is straightforward: the bill would convert digital game purchases from revocable licenses into genuine ownership, require games with online functionality to provide an offline mode before server shutdown, and preserve consumers' ability to resell their games. Each of these provisions attacks a different node in the industry's extraction architecture — the license-not-sale model, planned obsolescence via server dependency, and the elimination of secondary markets. Torres uses NBA 2K25 as his flagship example, and it's a good one. The game retailed at $69.99 standard and $99.99 for the All-Star Edition. It will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30 and have its online servers killed December 31 — barely two years after release. A consumer who paid $100 for a product that evaporates on a corporate timeline isn't a customer. They're a subscriber who wasn't told they were subscribing. The bill's political logic is sound. Digital ownership is one of those rare issues where populist anger maps cleanly onto genuine market failure. There is no coherent consumer-side argument for the status quo. The industry's position — that you're licensing, not buying, even when the storefront says "Buy Now" for $69.99 — is a textbook deceptive trade practice that has simply gone unregulated long enough to become normalized. The real question is enforcement architecture. Directing the FTC to "establish regulations" is a common legislative move that pushes the hard design work downstream. What counts as a sufficient offline mode? How does resale work for digital goods without creating piracy loopholes? Does this apply retroactively to existing libraries? The bill's strength is its clarity of principle; its weakness is the distance between principle and implementable rule. The games industry will push back hard. Digital-only distribution eliminated manufacturing, shipping, and retail margin costs — savings that were captured almost entirely by publishers, not passed to consumers. The license model compounds this by killing the used-game market that once provided price competition. Ownership restoration threatens both revenue streams simultaneously. Still, this is a bill introduction, not a law. It faces the standard gauntlet: committee assignment, markup, industry lobbying, potential dilution. The EU's Digital Markets Act and recent regulatory actions in France on this exact issue give Torres useful international precedent, but the American legislative process is where good consumer-protection ideas go to be negotiated into irrelevance. Watch whether the bill attracts bipartisan co-sponsors — digital ownership has the populist cross-aisle energy that could actually move it, or at minimum force the FTC's hand on existing authority.
