Step 1 — What free-to-play actually asks of you

Step 1 of 5 · Berth 11-1

Why "free" is a price and not a description

When a shop says a tin of paint is free, you expect to walk out with the tin and owe nothing. When a computer game says it is free, something different is being said: the first copy costs nothing, and the business behind it expects to earn its money later, from some players, in ways that are written down somewhere you have not read yet.

That is not a trick. It is an ordinary business model, used by some of the largest games in the world, and plenty of people play these games for years and pay nothing. But it does mean that the word "free" tells you about one moment — the moment you obtain the game — and nothing about the months after it. Step 1 exists so that by the end of this page, "free" stops being a reassurance and becomes a question: free of what, and paid for by whom?

The question matters most at the start, because the start is when you have the least information and the most momentum. Once a game is installed and you have spent nine hours on it, you are a different kind of reader of its price list. Reading the price list first costs you twenty minutes and changes nothing else.

The words you will meet, defined once

Everything in this course uses plain words where plain words exist. Where the industry has a term you will see on the vendor's own pages, here it is, once, in the order you are likely to meet it.

Client

The program that runs on your own computer. "Downloading the client" means downloading the game itself, as opposed to playing in a web browser.

Launcher

A small program that keeps the client up to date and starts it. Many vendors ship one; it is usually what you actually install first.

Patch or update

A change to the game, delivered after installation. Large games patch often, and each patch uses data on your connection.

Account

The record the vendor keeps of you: an email address, a password, your progress and anything you have paid for. You do not own the game; you hold an account that lets you use it, under terms covered in Step 3.

In-game currency

Points, coins or tokens bought with real money and spent inside the game. The conversion between dollars and tokens is set by the vendor and is often not one-to-one, which makes a token price harder to compare than a dollar price.

Cosmetic item

Something you can buy that changes how a thing looks without changing what it does. A different paint scheme, a flag, a name colour.

Progression item

Something you can buy that affects how quickly you advance, or that gives you access to equipment you would otherwise have to earn. Whether a game sells these, and how far they go, is the single most useful thing to know about its shop.

Randomised item

A purchase where you pay a known price for an unknown reward, drawn from a pool. Discussed in its own section below.

The four shapes free-to-play usually takes

Across the whole category, the money has to come from somewhere. In practice it arrives in one of four shapes, and a given game normally uses two or three of them at once. None of these is automatically bad; the point is to recognise which shapes a game is using before you start.

One: selling appearance

The game sells cosmetic items only. Nothing you buy makes you better at the game; it makes you look different. This is the easiest shape to live with as a new player, because declining to spend costs you nothing except the appearance.

Two: selling time

The game is playable at no cost, but advancing takes a long while. For money, you can advance faster — more in-game earnings per hour, a shorter wait, a skipped grind. Here your choice is genuinely between dollars and hours, and the sensible question is how many hours you were planning to give it anyway.

Three: selling access

Some content is behind a payment: a particular vehicle, map, campaign or tier. This shape is the one to read most carefully, because the published requirements for the free portion and the paid portion can differ, and because what is included can change between patches.

Four: selling subscription

A recurring charge, usually monthly, that bundles several of the above — faster earning, extra storage, cosmetic extras. Subscriptions are the only shape that bills you again without a second decision, so they deserve a calendar reminder rather than good intentions.

Randomised items, and why Australia treats them carefully

A randomised item is a purchase with a known cost and an unknown reward. You pay, and the game draws something from a pool. These have been the subject of sustained public attention in Australia, including in the classification system, because paying for an uncertain outcome resembles gambling in form even where it is not gambling in law.

Two practical points follow, and both are about reading rather than about taking a position.

First, Australia's classification scheme is the place where a game's treatment of these features is recorded. The Australian Classification Board publishes its decisions, including the classification and the consumer advice attached to a title. Step 3 walks you through searching it. We do not state any rating, age threshold or legal position for any specific game here, because the Board publishes those and we are not a substitute for it.

Second, if there is someone under eighteen in the household, a game's randomised purchases are the single thing most worth looking up before, not after. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families on games and in-game spending, written for parents rather than for players. Nothing in this course presents a purchasable randomised item as suitable for a child.

The second currency: your time

Money is the obvious cost and the easy one to bound. Time is the one that catches people out, because it is spent in small amounts and nobody sends you a statement.

Large desktop games are built to be returned to. Daily rewards, weekly events and seasonal passes all work by making today's session worth more if you also played yesterday. That design is open and well understood; it is not hidden from you. But it means that the realistic question before installing is not "do I want to try this?" — almost everyone does — but "what does three evenings a week look like in my life, and am I happy with that?"

Write an honest number down now, before any game has had a chance to influence it. You will compare it against reality in Step 5, and comparing it to a number you wrote in advance is much more useful than comparing it to a feeling.

The worked example: what the household writes down

Return to the hypothetical household from the homepage — one hallway desktop, two adults, a fourteen-year-old, nobody with any experience of games. This is an illustration written to show the steps in use. It is not a real family, it reports no results and it says nothing about any product.

At the end of Step 1, their note says four things. The computer runs Windows, so Linux is not a problem for them. The adult who asked would use an existing personal email address rather than making a new one. The annual spending figure they settle on is forty Australian dollars, which one of them describes as "a cinema ticket and a coffee". And they write down that the fourteen-year-old will want to play too, which means classification and randomised purchases are now questions they have to answer rather than questions they can skip.

Notice what is not in the note: any decision about whether to install anything. That decision comes after Step 3, and the course is arranged so it can go either way.