LOT 04-30

About this site

Calmspan publishes one thing: a five-step beginner's course on free-to-play PC games, written for readers in Australia. This page explains who publishes it, how it was put together, what it relies on, and how it is paid for.

The publisher

Calmspan is published by:

The course is produced by the Bounty Gastro s.r.o. editorial team. There are no individual bylines on this site, no author pages and no instructor profiles, because the pages are a maintained body of work rather than a series of personal opinions. Correspondence about any page goes to the address above and is answered by the same team.

How the course was structured

The five steps were written as one sequence, not as five separate articles that were later put in an order. The sequence follows the order in which the decisions actually arise for someone new to the category: understand the business model, check the machine, make the account deliberately, deal with age and money, then play and decide whether to keep playing.

Each step assumes the step before it and does not repeat its explanations. That is why a term defined in Step 1 — client, launcher, cosmetic, in-game currency — is used without redefinition in Step 4. It is also why every step ends in a checklist: a step that cannot be reduced to a short list of things a reader can do on their own was, in our view, not finished.

We chose a workbook rather than a review site because the useful thing to teach is a method. Rankings age badly; the questions in Step 2 and Step 4 will still work on titles that do not exist yet.

What each step relies on

Three kinds of source, and we keep them separate on purpose.

The vendor's own description. Everything this site says about the one named game, Crossout, comes from the vendor's description of its offer: that it is a free-to-play MMO vehicle-combat game set in post-apocalyptic realities, built on vehicles players construct and modify themselves, and that it is offered for desktop computers running Windows or Linux, with no Mac version in scope. Where the vendor does not state something — a price, a classification, a hardware figure, whether randomised items are sold — the course says that the vendor does not state it and sends you to the vendor's own pages. We do not fill those gaps.

Australian government bodies. Where a step needs a reference about rules, rights or safety, it links to the body responsible rather than to a secondary summary: the Australian Classification Board for classification, the ACCC for consumer law, the OAIC for privacy, the eSafety Commissioner for online safety, the ACSC for general security guidance, and Scamwatch for current scam descriptions.

General practice in the category. The procedures — how to read your own system information, how to compare against a requirements list, how to set up an account carefully, how to run a first session — are written as general guidance that applies across free-to-play PC games. They are not a walkthrough of any one publisher's interface, and they are phrased as guidance rather than as findings, because that is what they are.

There are no statistics, test results, benchmarks or scores anywhere on this site. We have not measured anything, so we report nothing measured.

Review schedule

The course is reviewed at least twice a year, and in between whenever one of the linked government pages moves or changes name, or when the description of the named game's offer changes. Each review checks that every outbound link resolves, that nothing has been stated more confidently than its source supports, and that the Australian references are still current.

The date of the most recent review appears in the footer of every page, including this one. The legal pages carry their own effective dates, which change when the policies change rather than when the course text does.

The commercial relationship, stated plainly

This site earns money. Links to Crossout on this site are paid affiliate links: if you follow one and create an account, the affiliate network that operates the link may pay Bounty Gastro s.r.o. a commission. So yes — the one product named repeatedly in this course is a product the publisher has a commercial relationship with, and it would be dishonest to bury that in a footnote.

What that relationship does not do is decide the content. The course was written as a method with a worked example, the example needed to be a real title with narrowly published platform requirements, and nothing in the five steps recommends installing anything. The restriction that rules the game out for Mac households appears in Step 1 and again in Step 2, at the front of the page, because leaving it out would make the course worse and the commission is not worth that.

The full explanation of the arrangement, including what does decide the content, is on the Affiliate Disclosure page. The course is written so that it remains worth reading with every affiliate link stripped out of it.

What this site is not

It is not operated by, affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher of any game named on it. It is not a news outlet and runs no investigations. It is not a download site — nothing is hosted here except the pages themselves. It is not an enrolled or accredited course: there is no account, no progress, no assessment and no certificate, and there is nothing to sign up for. It collects nothing about you, which the Privacy Policy sets out principle by principle.

If a page here is wrong, out of date or unclear, write to info@calmspan.online and say which page and which sentence.