A US Congressman Wants to Make Buying GTA 6 Mean Owning It

A US congressman wants to make buying a video game mean owning it. Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York, has announced the Power to the Players Act, a bill built on a single line. "If you pay for it, you own it." A game that vanishes when a company pulls the plug, he says, is "a rental disguised as a sale." It is the first major federal attempt at something we have covered from almost every other angle and the adults that Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said will buy or have already bought Grand Theft Auto VI sit right in the middle of it.

The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules so that paying for a digital game grants ownership, with the right to own, play and transfer it, rather than a license that can expire at any moment. Games with online features would need offline modes that keep working after the servers shut down. Torres calls it a return to the historical norm, the way discs and cartridges worked through the '80s, '90s and 2000s. He also calls it an affordability issue as game prices climb and he isn't just in this for the clout. He grew up playing Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil and SOCOM.

The bill uses NBA 2K25 as an example. The annual 2K Sports title was the fifth best-selling game in the US in 2024 and its publisher plans to pull it from digital stores on October 30, 2026, then switch off its online servers on January 1, 2027, which would make its most popular modes unplayable for everyone who bought it. People paid full price for a game that is about to stop working, the exact problem Torres wants the FTC to address.

GTA 6 isn't part of the conversation just by association. The upcoming title is the biggest digital-first launch the industry has and will probably ever see. The standard edition's "physical" copy is a download code in a box and the $100 Ultimate Edition is digital only. Pre-orders are running heavily digital, by some counts near 90 percent, though that figure is reported rather than official. Every one of those purchases is a license under the current model.

This is not hypothetical either. Sony already argued the point in court. As part of a US lawsuit, the company said buyers never owned their digital games in the first place, even using GTA 6 to make the case. They said that you can buy the game, buy the Ultimate Edition and pay a hundred dollars, yet what you hold is a revocable license that a ban, a delisting or a server shutdown can erase. Torres's bill would flip that default.

This is a fight that multiple legislators and people in authority are fighting across multiple borders. After Sony said it would stop making discs, Brazil's consumer regulator PROCON-SP told the company it still has to respect consumer rights, digital games included, rather than strip access through its terms of service. Mexican lawmakers took Sony to antitrust court over the disc phase-out. Others warned the end of discs could make GTA 6 more expensive, with no resale and total platform control. Torres's bill is the first time the fight has reached the US Congress.

The offline clause matters most for a game like GTA 6. Its online mode is expected in 2027. If it runs anything like Grand Theft Auto Online, people will pour years and real money into it. A decade from now, a shut-down server or a closed account could leave all of that stranded. The bill's requirement that online games keep working offline after the servers go dark is aimed squarely at that risk.

With that said, the bill doesn't settle anything. Yet. It isn't formally introduced, it has no cosponsors and as Kotaku pointed out, 87 percent of legislation never gets a full vote. Big publishers will lobby hard against any rule that limits what they can revoke. The bill also covers games only, not movies or music, though Torres hopes it sets a precedent. However, more pressure for governments to protect gamer rights is always better and the more countries that join the cause in an official capacity, the more companies will have no choice but to listen.

So the ownership fight now has a US federal champion with GTA 6 is its biggest live example. Whether the Power to the Players Act becomes law or not, it puts a name and a number to a question millions of buyers are about to face in a new way.