---
title: "Pennsylvania Bill Would Make Publishers Pay Before They Kill a Game"
description: "The proposed Protect Our Games Act demands 60 days’ notice and an offline fix, a patch, or a refund before access dies"
author: "Tomasz Idle"
published: 2026-09-28T14:25:36Z
modified: 2026-09-28T18:23:25Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/pennsylvania-bill-would-make-publishers-pay-before-they-kill-3d54fb
language: en
tags: ["law", "gaming", "regulation", "consumer-rights", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Pennsylvania Bill Would Make Publishers Pay Before They Kill a Game

*The proposed Protect Our Games Act demands 60 days’ notice and an offline fix, a patch, or a refund before access dies*

By Tomasz Idle · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/pennsylvania-bill-would-make-publishers-pay-before-they-kill-3d54fb

## In brief

- Pa. Sen. John Kane has circulated a memo seeking support for the proposed Protect Our Games Act
- Publishers would need to give customers at least 60 days’ notice before ending access to a digital game
- After a shutdown, firms must offer offline play, an independent online patch, or a refund of at least 25% of the initial sale price
- Subscriptions are exempt; enforcement would rest with the state attorney general and district attorneys
- The bill has not been formally introduced, so its language and obligations could still change

Picture the transaction. You pay $70 for a video game. You play it happily for two years. Then one day the publisher, a company in another state with another quarter to think about, switches off its servers, and your purchase quietly changes state. It does not disappear from your library. It sits there, inert, a file that remembers being a game the way a unplugged jukebox remembers music.

The distance between holding a license and holding a working product is the gap Pennsylvania state Sen. John Kane wants to close. Kane, a Democrat representing Chester and Delaware counties, has circulated a memo seeking support for the proposed Protect Our Games Act. Worth saying up front: the bill had not been formally introduced at the time of reporting, so everything about it remains wet ink — language, enforcement, the lot.

Under the outline in Kane’s memo, video-game manufacturers would have to notify customers at least 60 days before ending access to a digital game or changing one of its features. After the shutdown, the company would owe players at least one remedy. According to local21news.com and Yahoo News reporting on the memo, the menu of options includes making the game work offline, releasing a patch that keeps online play alive without the company’s own servers, or issuing a qualifying refund.

That refund comes with a floor: no less than 25 percent of the game’s initial sale price, calculated against the highest digital price it carried in the preceding 12 months. Subscription services, which sell time-limited access and are honest about it, would be exempt. Enforcement would sit with the Pennsylvania Attorney General and the state’s district attorneys. Until actual bill text exists, all of these obligations could shift.

None of this arrives from nowhere. The fight over murdered games has a movement behind it — Stop Killing Games, founded in 2024 by YouTuber Ross Scott after Ubisoft announced it was shutting down its online-only racing game *The Crew*, as [the Guardian has reported](https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/jun/19/stop-killing-games-activists-campaigning-online-gaming). The campaign’s European petition gathered enough signatures to be presented to the European Commission, and in March 2026 the French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir sued Ubisoft over the shutdown, according to [the campaign’s chronology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Killing_Games). Kane’s memo reads like the American, state-sized echo of that argument — and it lands in a medium still arguing, from [Sony’s reported disc-free future](https://rews.cc/a/sony-is-still-listening-on-the-2028-playstation-disc-cutoff--158350) on down, about whether physical ownership should exist at all.

Here is the thing the memo does not do: require anyone to keep a game alive. Permanent access is not guaranteed under the described framework. A publisher could meet its whole obligation by cutting a check — and 25 percent of a $70 game is $17.50, which is less a remedy than a condolence card with a number on it. That is an analytical reading, pending final language, but the arithmetic does not need final language to add up.

Publishers, for their part, have genuine arguments available. Some titles are welded to centralized servers, third-party licensing agreements or security infrastructure in ways that make offline conversion genuinely hard rather than merely unprofitable. No industry statement appeared in the reporting reviewed, so that case remains unmade out loud. It will be made, loudly, the moment the bill has a number.

Formal introduction is the next milestone, and until then Pennsylvania players have no new rights at all — just a memo and a promise. If it passes, the state becomes a test bed for a deceptively simple question: what does buying a digital game actually buy? Ownership that can be switched off from a server room was never ownership. It was a rental that came with a receipt.