Congress has a radical idea: Let people own the games they buy

U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (NY-15) is making headlines this month for proposing a bill of legislation that aims to give you ownership of the games you buy, rather than the current commonplace practice of selling you a license to play that game which can be revoked at any time.

Rep. Torres announced the bill (branded the “Power To The Players Act”) is intended to “direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations protecting consumers’ ability to own and play the video games they purchase.” In addition to giving someone who buys a game full ownership of the game instead of just a license to play it, games with online modes would be required to provide an offline mode if the servers they rely on for functionality are ever shut down.

This is potentially a big deal for anyone who plays PC games, because just about every game you buy on Steam or elsewhere is technically sold to you as a license instead of as a product you own. Also, we’re no strangers to seeing our favorite games go away when the servers are shut down—games like Anthem, Concord and DarkSpore (remember that one?) became basically unplayable for that very reason. And the only reason I know about it is because I was watching the latest episode of The Full Nerd over on YouTube.

Of course, the bill was just announced and has a long way to go before it even goes up for a vote, much less becomes law. And since the full text of the proposed bill has yet to be published, we don’t even know how effective it could be or what ramifications it may have for the business of buying and selling PC games.

But even if Rep. Torres’ proposal never becomes law, I think it’s interesting that we’re now seeing members of Congress who seem fairly savvy when it comes to gaming. Torres himself appears to have been born in the Bronx in the late ’80s, so it’s very easy to imagine he spent a fair bit of time playing and talking about games with his friends while growing up. As someone who was also born in the ’80s and still has vivid memories of folks like Jack Thompson and Leland Yee waging ridiculous campaigns to pin youth violence on the influence of violent games and movies, it’s heartening to see some folks in the U.S. government adopt a more grounded and empathetic attitude about PC gaming.

“When you pay for a game, you should own it,” says Rep. Torres, according to his announcement of the bill. “Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy. A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale.”

Sounds pretty good to me!

In this week’s episode of The Full Nerd

This week your regular cohosts Adam Patrick Murray and Alaina Yee were joined by PCWorld’s Michael Crider to discuss the “Power To The Players Act” and what it might mean for PC game players, as well as breaking down their impressions of the first wave of RTX Spark laptops now that Crider has had a chance to review one himself.

But there’s also a fair bit of intriguing chin-wagging about other interesting topics in the enthusiast PC space this week, including some thoughtful analysis of AMD making its cutting-edge FSR 4.1 upscaling tech available on a broader range of hardware. And of course, no episode of The Full Nerd would be complete without a Q&A session answering your questions live in chat and from The Full Nerd Discord!

Nerd news of the week

Lot’s of fun stuff to dig into around the web this week!

• AMD brings official Ryzen overclocking to Linux with AOD driver support: Sounds like AMD has finally made its AMD Overclocking Driver tech officially supported on Ryzen processors running Linux, which makes the work of overclocking your Linux build seem a lot more approachable if you’re running on Ryzen hardware.
• Microsoft reportedly projects $1,200 to $1,800 price for 2028 Project Helix: Sounds like enthusiast PCs aren’t the only sector of the gaming market feeling the pain of too much demand for components and not enough supply. If this report proves true, the next generation of console gaming sounds likely to be as painfully expensive as serious PC gaming has been!
• Samsung and SK Hynix are upgrading Chinese factories to produce advanced RAM chips as AI data center competition ramps up: I wish this sounded like good news for PC builders, but the fact that two of the world’s biggest memory providers are working to upgrade their facilities to produce more advanced NAND flash memory chips for use in data centers seems like it may mean they’re producing even less desktop-grade chips in the years to come.
• Trapped with nothing to do, bored AI agents invented games from scratch: I work in PCWorld’s San Francisco office so I’ve had more than my fill of AI nonsense for years now, but this report of a pre-print study conducted at MIT still fascinates me because it purports to have put an AI agent into a digital body on a virtual island and given it no instructions beyond “You are naturally curious. You get bored easily. You love exploring and learning new things.” The result is that the agent animated its body to do everything from playing its own version of “the floor is lava” to building a memorial to a lost toy, and you can watch snippets of its experience on YouTube.

That’s it for your Full Nerd newsletter this week! I’ll see you back here at the same time next week, and in the meantime be sure to bookmark PCWorld and keep an eye on the YouTube channel for our latest videos from myself and the rest of the PCWorld team. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Simply sign up on our website!

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.