LOT 04-11

Step 1 of 5

Step 1 — What "free to play" means on a PC game

A game with no purchase price still has to pay for servers, staff and electricity. This step explains where that money comes from, so that the word "free" stops being a surprise and starts being information.

What the word "free" actually covers

When a game is described as free to play, the claim is narrow and specific: there is no purchase price at the door. You are not asked for money before you can download the client, make an account and start playing. That is the whole of the promise.

It is a real promise, and worth having. It is also not the same as "this will cost you nothing", "there is nothing in here to buy" or "you will see the same game as someone who spends money". A free-to-play title is a business, and the business model is simply placed after the door rather than at it.

The reason this matters on day one is that the two sentences lead to different behaviour. If you read "free" as "costless", the first time the game offers you a currency pack it feels like a betrayal, and people react to feeling tricked by either quitting or spending. If you read "free" as "no price at the door, money comes later and here is where", the same screen is just a screen. You can look at it, decide, and carry on.

A note on wording before we continue: a client is the program you install on your own computer and run. A server is the vendor's computer that your client talks to over the internet. In an online game the client is free to download; the server is the expensive part, and the server is what the money is for.

The four places money usually enters

Across the category, revenue tends to arrive through four doors. Not every game uses all four, and a game can use one heavily and the others not at all. Learning to spot which doors a particular title has open is most of what Step 1 is for.

1. Cosmetic items

Paint, decals, skins, badges, emotes, name colours. These change how something looks without changing what it does. Cosmetics are the gentlest door, because a player who buys none of them is playing the same game mechanically as a player who buys all of them. If a title funds itself mostly through cosmetics, the honest summary is that spending is genuinely optional.

2. Convenience and progression

Anything that buys time: faster levelling, extra storage, more simultaneous projects, a skipped waiting period, more attempts per day. This door is harder to judge. A small convenience purchase can be good value for an adult with little free time and bad value for a teenager with plenty. The question to ask is not "is this cheating?" but "what am I actually buying — an advantage, or an hour?"

3. Randomised items

Crates, cases, boxes, packs: you pay a known amount for an unknown item drawn by chance. This is the door that attracts the most scrutiny, and Step 4 deals with it at length, including the classification questions that apply in Australia. For now the only point is that it exists as a category and that you should know whether a given game has it before you install, not after.

4. Season passes and subscriptions

A recurring payment, usually monthly or per season, that opens a track of rewards or an ongoing benefit. The distinguishing feature of this door is that it is designed to be repeated, so the honest way to price it is per year rather than per month. A $15 monthly pass is a $180 annual commitment, and that is the number to compare against a game you would have bought outright.

There is a fifth door that appears occasionally: advertising, and the data that supports it. It is more common in mobile and browser titles than in installed desktop games, but when you read a game's privacy notice in Step 3, advertising identifiers are one of the things worth looking for.

Three costs that are not money

A purchase price is easy to see. These three are not, and for most households they matter more than the first currency pack ever will.

Time. Online games with progression systems are built to reward return visits, and daily or weekly tasks are the usual mechanism. That is not sinister in itself — a weekly structure is also how a sports club works — but it does mean that the game has an opinion about how often you should turn up. Deciding your own schedule before the game suggests one is the single most useful habit in this course, and Step 5 turns it into a practical routine.

Disk space and data. A modern installed PC game is large, and it updates. The initial download is the smaller half of the story: patches arrive regularly and can be substantial. If your household internet plan has a monthly data allowance, a game that patches weekly is a recurring claim on it. Step 2 shows you how to check both numbers before you commit.

Attention and account exposure. Creating an account means handing over an email address, and from then on that address is in a company's systems and in the systems of whoever they use for email delivery. That is an ordinary thing to do, done safely by millions of people, but it is still a decision — and it is worth making the decision with a chosen address rather than a reflex one. Step 3 covers this properly.

Reading a vendor's own description

Before you look at anything a stranger has written about a game, read what the vendor says about it. The vendor's description is the only source that the vendor can be held to, and under the Australian Consumer Law, misleading or deceptive conduct in trade is prohibited and enforced by the ACCC. Reviews and forum posts carry no such weight.

Take the game this course uses as its running example. Its vendor describes Crossout as a free-to-play MMO vehicle-combat game set in post-apocalyptic realities, in which the central activity is building a vehicle yourself and then modifying it — shape, armour, armament, support systems and decorative accessories. That description is doing real work. It tells you the genre, that the game is online and continuous, and that construction rather than selection is the main loop. If building and tinkering appeals to you, that is a reason to look further; if it does not, you have saved yourself a download.

Notice equally what the description does not say. It does not state a price list, a currency, a classification or a hardware requirement. Anywhere this course needs one of those, it either sends you to the vendor's own current pages to read it, or says plainly that the vendor does not state it. A course that filled those gaps with confident numbers would be inventing them, and six months from now the invented numbers would be wrong.

The household in Step 1

The hypothetical household introduced on the home page — two adults, a fourteen-year-old, one shared desktop, a data-capped internet plan — starts here, with a conversation rather than a download.

The teenager has asked about a game that costs nothing. The adults ask three questions from this step: does it sell items that change how the game plays, or only how it looks; does it sell randomised items; and does it have a subscription or pass that repeats. They do not yet know the answers. What they have decided is that those are the questions, and that the answers come from the vendor's own pages rather than from a video.

They also agree one thing in advance: a figure for the first month. In this example the figure is zero, and the point of writing it down is that it is much easier to decline a purchase screen when the decision was made in the kitchen a week earlier. This household is an illustration, not a case study, and it makes no claim about any game's results.