A US Representative has proposed legislation that would treat video game purchases as ownership rather than a licence, Ars Technica reports — a direct challenge to the end-user licence agreements under which nearly every digital game is sold.
The distinction is not semantic. When a game is sold as a licence, the buyer has no property right in it: publishers can delist it from stores, shut down the servers that make it run, patch out features or revoke an account, all without a refund. Players usually discover this only when the game they paid for stops working.
That failure mode has become a policy fight. Ubisoft's shutdown of The Crew in 2024 turned a quiet complaint into a campaign: the European "Stop Killing Games" citizens' initiative, which asks lawmakers to require publishers to leave games in a playable state after support ends, collected well over a million signatures and forced a formal response from the European Commission. In the United States, California's AB 2426, signed in 2024, already bars digital storefronts from calling something a "buy" or "purchase" unless they clearly disclose that the customer is getting a licence. The new federal bill goes further: it would change what the transaction is, not just how it is labelled.
If it advances, the practical question becomes enforcement. Ownership would imply an obligation — either to keep a game runnable (offline modes, server hand-off, private hosting) or to compensate buyers when that is impossible. Publishers counter that perpetual server operation is an open-ended cost, and that online games also carry third-party obligations: anti-cheat, moderation, licensed music and assets, and rented cloud capacity that cannot be transferred to a customer.
The bill's scope is the other open question, and the text, once available, will decide it: live-service games whose value is the multiplayer server, single-player titles with a mandatory online check, or all digital purchases. A narrower version aimed at games that are sold and then deliberately made unplayable would be far easier to defend — and far less disruptive to the business models the industry actually relies on.
Ars Technica's report is the opening of that argument, not the end of it.
