US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license"

Physical discs don’t solve the problem on their own, though. Many games sold on discs still require online servers to function, and generally, the end-user license agreements make it clear that the user is purchasing a revocable license, not actual ownership of the media, even if the files are burned onto something physical.

There are also numerous examples of games where the version that shipped on the disc was meaningfully distinct from the version players ultimately know because of patches. So it makes sense that consumers and their representatives are turning to legislation like this to drive a change in industry practices.

There have been activist and lobbying movements, such as Stop Killing Games, that have been advocating for change on this front, but different proposed bills around the world have suggested different kinds of solutions.

Potential technical concerns ahead

Some prior proposed legislation on this issue has required developers to keep servers running indefinitely, leading to criticism that those bills’ authors don’t understand the cost. This bill appears to take those criticisms into account—but at least as worded in the press release on Ritchie Torres’ House of Representatives website, it could still face resistance.

While the announcement does not say the bill requires online servers to remain online, it requires normally online-only games to offer offline modes of play so players can keep playing long after servers might be shut down. The way some online games are engineered, that may not be feasible, so this could require developers to take very different approaches to some online games’ architecture.

This bill’s proposal does not guarantee it will become law; it still has a long path ahead, and most proposed legislation never even makes it to a vote. And since the full text of the bill is not yet publicly available, it’s not yet possible to assess its effectiveness or enforceability.

There is another elephant in the room: Large language models and specialized coding harnesses have recently enabled a wave of decompilations and reconfigurations of both classic and contemporary video games and software. These projects are almost certainly currently illegal, but the scale of the movement is such that enforcement may be difficult. It’s possible that these new tools will change the shape of the software preservation conversation in the coming months and years.