A US bill designed to stop paid games being terminated and being made unplayable in the future has failed to pass a Senate vote.
The Protect Our Games Act, which was proposed by California Assemblyman Chris Ward, was put to a vote at the California State Assembly last month, where it won with a vote of 43-16.
The next step was to pass the bill to the State Senate, where it was debated and voted on again. Had this vote passed, a final version of the bill would then have been created with House and Senate members before being submitted for final approval.
However, as noted on the Reddit page of Stop Killing Games – a consumer movement seeking to preserve video games after they’re taken offline, to prevent them becoming unplayable as was the case with The Crew – the bill lost the vote at the State Senate, after four Democrats voted yes, three Republicans voted no, and the rest abstained.
“Those abstentions matter,” a campaign volunteer wrote on Reddit. “In a committee vote, an abstention is not neutral. It has the same practical effect as a no, because a bill only advances if it gets a majority of yes votes. Not enough yeses means the bill stops here for this session. That is the loss”.
The volunteer also claimed that the campaign had attempted to pass the bill without any funding or lobbying, stating: “This was our first attempt, in our first year, in the United States, with a US budget of zero dollars. No paid staff in California. No war chest. No in-person lobbying operation. The timeline was so compressed that we could not get funding in place fast enough to put people in the building.”
They also accused the Entertainment Software Association of lobbying senators with “claims that ranged from misleading to flatly false”, including a claim that running a private server similar to those run for games like Minecraft would be illegal.
“We are not stopping,” they added. “Not even close. Next session, we come back with an in-person lobbying presence, the funding to do this properly, and a long list of organizations and developers signed on in support.
“We are not limiting this to California. We intend to introduce versions of this in other state legislatures, and we are seriously looking at the federal level. The ESA is about to learn what it is like to fight on many fronts at once.”
Had the bill been passed without any modifications, publishers would have been legally required to give the public at least 60 days notice if it planned to shut down a game’s servers and prevent its “ordinary use” (to ensure players don’t buy it right before it’s shut down).
The publisher would then have to tell players the exact date the shutdown will occur, which services will no longer be provided, which game features will stop working as a result, any known security risks that might come as a result of the shutdown, and how the player can continue to either use the game or get a refund.
Publishers would then be legally required to either provide an alternate version of the game that no longer needs to connect to a server, patch or update the existing game so it can be played offline, or refund the player the full cost they originally paid for the game.
An example of how the process should work in the future is MultiVersus, Warner Bros‘ Smash Bros competitor, which was shut down in May 2025.
Although the game is no longer available, players who logged in between February 4 and its shutdown in May 30 saw their save file updated to allow an offline version of the game to continue to be playable, with all earned and purchased content available moving forward.
