A New York congressman has picked the fight that GTA VI walked into months ago. On October 15, Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat representing the Bronx, announced he will introduce the Power To The Players Act, which would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write rules protecting a buyer's ability to own and play the games they pay for. The announcement is not a bill yet. Torres' office says he will introduce it.
The bill's shape, as his office describes it, is two requirements. Buying a game would grant the buyer ownership of it rather than a license to play it, and games with online features would have to offer an offline mode before the servers that support them are switched off. Torres framed it as a consumer question rather than a gaming one. When you pay for a game, you should own it, he said. His fuller statement called a game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug something closer to a rental disguised as a sale.
The example his office leads with is NBA 2K25, and the numbers there do the arguing. It sold at 69.99 for the standard edition and 99.99 for the All-Star Edition, gets delisted from digital storefronts on October 30, and has its online servers shut down on December 31. That is roughly two years after release, on a timeline the publisher set. If you bought the digital version, the store will stop selling it and the online half will stop working, and nothing in the transaction changes that.
That is the exact structure GTA VI will ship into. Take-Two's CEO has said the game will not launch on a disc. Rockstar's store sells the soundtrack on vinyl and CD while the game itself is download-only, and the boxed copies that do exist at retail hold a download code rather than install data. The company has also said the boxed version arrives November 12 to support preloading. So the largest game of the decade will reach its buyers as a license tied to a storefront account, and the recital of that fact has been happening in French legislative debate and in a US House press release within about a week of each other.
What Torres is actually asking for is narrower than that sounds. The bill does not nationalize storefronts or force anyone to press discs. It hands the rulemaking to the FTC and lets the agency define how ownership is preserved. That matters because it moves the argument out of the physical-versus-digital culture war and into consumer protection, where the question becomes boring and specific: what does it take for a purchase to survive a publisher's decision to stop supporting it?
The bill is also being read as a US answer to Stop Killing Games, the campaign that grew out of Ubisoft shutting down The Crew and that has been pushing governments to treat server shutdowns as a consumer rights problem. Torres' office does not use that framing, but the mechanism is the same one the campaign has asked for: a legal obligation that outlives the company's interest in a title.
Now the limits. Torres announced the bill, he has not introduced it. As of this writing there is no bill number, no published text, no cosponsor list, and no committee referral. Engadget reported asking his office for a draft and for comment on whether the FTC could be blocked in court, and did not have either at publication. Shacknews described the bill as submitted for a vote, which is further than the primary source supports. Until a clerk assigns a number, the safe reading is that this is a stated intention with a press release behind it.
Even a filed bill would face a hard road. A California bill that offered similar state-level protections died in committee in June, according to Engadget. The FTC route is harder than it looked a few years ago: after the 2024 Supreme Court decision that ended Chevron deference, an agency rule can be challenged on the grounds that Congress never gave it the authority to write that rule. The commission's noncompete ban was stopped that way. A digital ownership rule would be a large target for the same argument, and the first lawsuit would probably arrive before the rule took effect.
There is also a gap between owning a game and owning a running game. Ownership of the software does not restore the servers, the matchmaking, or the licensed music that a live game depends on. The offline mode requirement is the part that tries to bridge it, and it is the part with the most unanswered questions: how much of a game counts as an offline mode, whether a stripped single-player shell satisfies it, and who decides. None of that is in the announcement, because there is no text yet.
For GTA VI buyers, the practical answer today is that nothing moves. The release date is November 19, 2026. Preload opens November 12. The editions are the 79.99 Standard and the 99.99 Ultimate. Rockstar has not commented on the bill, and a bill that has not been introduced cannot change a preorder. If you are deciding today whether to buy digital or to hold out for a disc that does not exist, this announcement does not create one.
The thing worth watching is not a vote. It is whether Torres' office publishes text and finds cosponsors, and whether anyone in the industry answers on the record. Take-Two's position so far has been that discs do not make sense for the consumer, which is an argument about convenience and cost. Torres is making an argument about duration, about what happens years later when the convenience is gone. Those two positions can both be sincere, and they cannot both win.