The game was paid for, downloaded, and played for years. Then the publisher switched off the servers, and the copy on the hard drive became a paperweight. A California bill advancing through the state legislature would make that outcome illegal for future games: publishers would have to keep paid games playable after online servers shut down, either by releasing an offline version, an enabling patch, or a full refund.
The proposal, which cleared the Assembly’s appropriations committee in mid-May and now heads to a floor vote, would rewrite the legal meaning of digital ownership for one of the largest entertainment markets in the world. Its central question is simple: when a consumer pays for a game, do they own something, or have they rented access until the publisher decides otherwise? The answer, as the industry has practiced it for a decade, is mostly the latter. California is proposing to change that.
What the bill requires
The legislation, authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward and backed by the Stop Killing Games consumer campaign, requires publishers to give buyers at least 60 days’ notice before shutting down the online services a game depends on. When the servers go dark, the publisher must provide one of three things: a playable offline version of the game, a patch that enables private community servers, or a full refund of the purchase price.
The scope is deliberately narrow. Free-to-play games, subscription-based titles, and games that are already playable offline are exempt. The bill targets paid games that rely on publisher-run online systems to function – the live-service titles that become unusable the moment their authentication servers are switched off. Under the current text, the requirements would apply to games first offered for sale on or after January 1, 2027, a timeline that gives publishers room to redesign their games around preservation requirements rather than retrofitting old ones. Enforcement remains an open question: the bill does not spell out how a regulator would verify that a released offline version is genuinely playable, or how a refund would be valued for a game bought years earlier at a discount. Critics say those details will determine whether the law becomes a meaningful floor or a paperwork exercise.
The road to Sacramento
The bill is the result of a consumer movement that has been building for two years. It traces back to 2024, when Ubisoft shut down The Crew, a racing game that players had paid for, and permanently removed access to it. YouTuber Ross Scott, whose Accursed Farms channel had long campaigned on digital ownership, launched Stop Killing Games, which organized consumer pressure campaigns, European citizens’ initiatives, and lobbying efforts that have pushed the issue onto legislative agendas on both sides of the Atlantic.
The movement’s European Citizens’ Initiative has collected more than 1.3 million signatures, and in France, consumer group UFC-Que Choisir filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft in March 2026 over The Crew’s shutdown, alleging that the company misled consumers about the permanence of their purchase. California’s bill is the most concrete legislative result so far. The bill passed the Assembly’s appropriations committee in mid-May with the support of consumer groups and against opposition from the Entertainment Software Association, the industry’s main lobbying arm, which has argued that the requirements would burden publishers and could push some older games off the market entirely rather than keep them playable.
Why it matters
California’s actions tend to set standards for the rest of the country, and for global markets, because companies rarely build separate product lines for a single state. If the bill becomes law, publishers shipping games worldwide will have to decide whether to build offline fallbacks and community-server support into every live-service title they sell – or restrict what they sell in California.
The bill also extends the state’s emerging framework for digital ownership. California already passed a digital goods law in 2024 requiring sellers to disclose when “buying” a digital product only grants a license, and AB 2426’s disclosure rules have been in force since 2025. The new bill goes further, moving from telling consumers what they are buying to telling sellers what they can do after the sale. The progression is the legal system working through the question that physical media never forced anyone to ask: what happens to a product when the company that made it decides it no longer exists? The economics of old games push in the opposite direction: keeping a live-service title running costs money – servers, security patches, support staff – while a dead game earns nothing, which is why publishers have treated shutdown as a routine cost of doing business. The bill asks them to internalize that cost at the point of sale instead, and the industry’s opposition suggests it believes the price would be substantial.
California is trying to put a floor under digital ownership: if a game is sold, it must remain playable, or the buyer gets their money back. The bill is narrow, the exemptions are real, and the enforcement question – how a state verifies that a game is “playable” – remains open. But the direction is clear, and publishers that build live-service games around a permanent kill switch are watching the closest legislative race in the industry’s recent history.
