About Even Datum

Publisher and editorial method · Berth 21-3

Even Datum publishes one thing: a five-step workbook for readers in Australia who have never installed a free-to-play desktop game and would like to understand what they are agreeing to before they do. There is nothing else on the site, there will not be, and the workbook is complete rather than a sample of something larger.

How the course was structured

The five steps were designed backwards from a single question: what does somebody actually need to know, in what order, to make an informed decision about installing a game of this type? Everything that did not serve that question was cut, including most of what the category usually writes about.

The ordering rule is strict. No step uses a term that an earlier step has not defined, and no step asks you to do something that depends on information a later step provides. That is why the hardware work sits in Step 2 rather than Step 4, where it would feel more natural but would arrive too late to influence a decision — and why the money question sits in Step 1, before you have invested any effort and become a worse judge of it.

Each step ends in a checklist because a lesson you cannot act on is a lesson you will not retain. The checklists are static printed lists. They do not record what you ticked, because recording it would mean storing something about you, and the simplest way to protect a reader's privacy is to collect nothing at all.

Authorship is the Fourasia s.r.o. editorial team. There are no individual bylines on this site and no biographies, because the workbook is a collective product and attaching an invented name or a stock photograph to it would tell you nothing true about who wrote it or why you should trust it.

What each step relies on

The sourcing rule is that a general claim is either linked to the body that publishes it or written as general guidance that a reader can check for themselves. Nothing is presented as a research finding, a benchmark or a statistic, because we have run no research and produced no benchmarks.

• Step 1 relies on the ordinary, publicly described structure of free-to-play business models, and on the Australian Classification Board and the eSafety Commissioner for anything touching randomised purchases and young players.
• Step 2 relies on the system information screens built into Windows and macOS, and on whatever requirements the vendor publishes on the day you read them. We keep no copy of any vendor's requirements, deliberately.
• Step 3 relies on the vendor's own published agreement, the Classification Board's published decisions, the ACCC for the Australian Consumer Law, and the OAIC for privacy.
• Step 4 relies on general security practice as published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre, and on Scamwatch for the reporting route when something is not what it claims to be.
• Step 5 relies on the eSafety Commissioner for in-game contact and reporting, on the ACCC and the OAIC for cancellation and deletion, and names the National Gambling Helpline as an existing Australian support service.

We describe those bodies only. None of them has reviewed, approved or had any involvement with this site, and linking to a regulator is not an endorsement by it.

Facts about specific products

One product is named in the course: World of Warships. Everything this site says about it comes from the material supplied by the affiliate network that operates our link — that the network runs the game's affiliate programme, that the commission is paid on a single opt-in consisting of a download and the creation and activation of an account, and that the game is published for desktop Windows and Mac computers with no Linux version.

Where a reader might expect us to say more — what the game is like, what its shop sells, what it is classified as, how it performs — we say that the vendor publishes it and the reader should look. That is not modesty. It is that we have not been told those things, and inventing them would be the most ordinary way for a site like this to mislead someone.

The commercial relationship, stated plainly

This site earns money from affiliate commission. The links to World of Warships are paid links: if you follow one and go on to create and activate an account, the affiliate network that operates the link pays Fourasia s.r.o. a commission. Your price is unaffected.

So yes — the single product named in this workbook is a product we have a commercial relationship with. We think the honest response to that is not to pretend otherwise but to constrain what the relationship can touch. The course ranks nothing, recommends nothing and compares nothing. Every exercise is written to be done against any vendor in the category. Every checklist can be completed without following any link, and several steps say explicitly that deciding not to install anything is a complete outcome.

What decides the content is whether it helps a beginner make an informed decision. What does not decide it is which products pay commission, at what rate, or whether a step makes a purchase more or less likely. The Affiliate Disclosure page sets the arrangement out in full, including where in the course the links appear.

How often it is reviewed

The workbook is reviewed twice a year. It is also reviewed out of cycle whenever something changes that affects what a step says: a change to the Australian Consumer Law, a change to the national classification scheme, a change to how one of the linked regulators publishes its material, or a change to what the affiliate network tells us about the product named.

The review date appears in the footer of every page. When a step's substance changes, the change is made in the step rather than noted at the bottom, because a workbook is only useful if its current state is correct; the date tells you how recently that state was confirmed.

What this site is not

• Not an official source for any game, not a partner of any vendor, and not authorised or endorsed by anyone.
• Not a news outlet, not an investigation and not a review publication.
• Not accredited training. There is nothing to register for, no certificate and no record of completion.
• Not technical support, and not able to see, scan or assess your computer.
• Not a place that collects anything about you. No forms, no sign-up, no cookies, no analytics.