A California bill tied to the Stop Killing Games movement has cleared a floor vote, pushing forward proposed protections for buyers of digital games that lose required online services.
The legislation, identified as AB 1921, is part of California’s 2025–2026 session. It targets a familiar pain point: you buy a game, the publisher pulls the plug on the servers, and suddenly your purchase is a useless file on your hard drive.
The bill isn’t law yet. It still needs to pass the California Senate and then survive Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk.
If a digital game operator stops providing services needed for the game’s “ordinary use,” the operator must give buyers one or more remedies. The headline option in the bill text: “a version of the digital game that can be used by the purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator.”
In plain English: when the lights go out on the official servers, publishers have to leave players with something playable that doesn’t depend on those servers.
The bill doesn’t force companies to keep servers running forever. It doesn’t mandate endless updates or matchmaking. It’s an end-of-life obligation, not a perpetual support contract.
Which games would be covered
A key amendment limits the bill to digital games first sold or rereleased for purchase on or after January 1, 2027. The word “first” matters here. The bill is no longer retroactive, so most existing live-service titles wouldn’t be covered unless they get a fresh rerelease after the deadline.
That softens the impact for older games built without offline functionality in mind, but it also means already-shuttered titles like The Crew wouldn’t be saved by this law.
If the bill becomes law, publishers releasing covered games in California from that date forward will need to bake end-of-life planning into development. That could affect server architecture, offline-mode planning, private-server tooling, and EULA language.
What happens next
The bill heads to the California Senate, where game publishers and tech industry groups are expected to push back hard. If it survives, Newsom will decide whether to sign it. California Democrats have a supermajority, but veto overrides against Newsom are rare, so his call could be decisive.
California also isn’t new to this fight. In 2024, the state passed AB 2426, forcing digital storefronts to clearly disclose when a “purchase” is actually a license. AB 1921 would take the next step by addressing what happens after the sale, when the servers go dark.
