Torres Says Buying a Game Should Mean Owning It. The Bill Has No Text Yet, and NBA 2K25 Is the Test

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said on October 15 that he will introduce the Power To The Players Act, which would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules so that buying a video game means owning it. Does it ship, or is it a demo slide? Right now it is closer to the slide. The announcement includes no bill text, no bill number, and no list of cosponsors.

What the announcement actually promises

The press release on Torres's House site is short. It says buying a game would give the buyer "ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," and that games with online features would need an "offline mode" before the servers behind them are switched off. It also says the bill would protect the ability to resell. Torres's own phrasing is three rights: to own, to play, and to transfer.

“It is a rental disguised as a sale.”

Notice what is missing. The release does not say publishers must keep servers running. Ars Technica said the bill appears to take that into account, since earlier proposals that demanded indefinite uptime drew criticism over cost. The same Ars piece warns that some online games are built in ways that make an offline mode hard to retrofit, and that with no text published, nobody can yet judge how enforceable the bill is.

The test case is a single-player mode

Torres's release picks NBA 2K25 as the example. It sold for $69.99 standard and $99.99 in the All-Star Edition. 2K will pull it from digital storefronts on October 30, and its servers go dark on December 31, about two years after its September 2024 launch.

The detail that matters for the bill is MyCareer, a single-player story mode. VGC reports that progress in it is tied to Virtual Currency, so when VC stops working on January 1, 2027, MyCareer stops too, along with the MyTeam mode. Dexerto adds that attribute upgrades run through 2K's servers, and that MyCareer has had no offline option since NBA 2K20, a history it credits to the fan site NLSC. Play Now, MyNBA and The W keep working offline.

That complicates Torres's line that a game can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug. Owners can still redownload NBA 2K25 after the delisting, and the offline modes survive. What goes dark is multiplayer and the modes built on VC. Whether the bill's "offline mode" would cover a mode like MyCareer, or only a stripped-down version of the game, is exactly the question the text will have to answer.

Shutdown as a schedule, not a surprise

Dexerto reports that NBA 2K22, 2K23 and 2K24 each went dark on December 31, roughly 28 months after launch, and that 2K's support page lists December 31, 2028 as the retirement date for NBA 2K27, which launched on September 4. Per Dexerto, 2K's stated reason is that running servers for older titles becomes commercially unfeasible once players move to newer releases. That is the publisher's side of the argument, and it is a cost claim 2K has not itemized. I could not load 2K's support page, which returned a bot-check wall, so the 2K details here come from VGC and Dexerto.

One discrepancy: Ars Technica dates NBA 2K25's launch to September 6, 2025. VGC and Dexerto both say 2024, and this piece uses 2024.

The wider market points the same direction. Ars reports that Sony's latest earnings put digital downloads at 82 percent of full-game unit sales on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. I did not check Sony's filing, so treat the figure as Ars's. Dexerto also reports that the European Commission declined in June to force publishers to keep discontinued games playable and chose industry talks on clearer labeling, a claim I found only there.

What to watch when the text lands

Ars notes that most proposed legislation never reaches a vote, and an announcement with no cosponsors named is not a vote count. The first things to check are the definition of "offline mode," whether the FTC gets a deadline, and whether older titles are covered. Until then this is a press release with a good example attached.