New US law could completely change how games consoles work
by Andrew Griffin
A new US law could transform how buying video games for consoles work.
The proposed “Power To The Players Act” aims to ensure that players actually “own” their games, rather than losing access to them when developers decide to shut them down.
It comes amid ongoing controversy from video game players over the restrictions that developers place on their games. Earlier this year, for instance, developers Rockstar announced that the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 would only be available in a digital edition, and Sony said that it would soon move towards discontinuing physical games entirely.
When those games are sold only digitally, they give developers and platform owners vastly more power over how they are played. It means that players are unable to buy or sell games second-hand, for instance, as well as allowing developers to cut off support.
Ritchie Torres, the Congressman who proposed the new law, pointed specifically to the example of NBA 2K25, which sold for as much as $100 and will have its online servers shut down on 31 December, only two years after it was released. “No consumer should have a game they paid for pulled out from under them on a company’s arbitrary timeline,” his office said.
“When you pay for a game, you should own it,” Mr. Torres said in a statement. “Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy.
“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.”
He said that families “save up to buy these games” and find that they can “vanish at any time”. The new law would ensure “consumers own what they buy and can keep playing long after a company moves on”, he said.
The bill would require that buying a video game meant that customers have “ownership of the game rather than a license to play it”. It would force the developers of games with online functionality to provide an offline mode before servers are shut down.
Other attempts to address the problem, in response to campaigning by pressure groups such as Stop Killing Games, have aimed to require developers to keep online servers indefinitely. But developers have complained that would lead to impossible costs over time, and the bill appears to respond to those criticisms by only requiring that companies ensure games remain playable offline.
Mr. Torrest suggested in an interview with games website Kotaku that the law would represent a “restoration to the historical norm”, giving players the ownership over games that they had before online and digital-only games.
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