Step 3 — Terms, ratings and the in-game shop

Step 3 of 5 · Berth 13-7

Three documents, not one

Before an account exists, a vendor has usually published three separate things about it, and new players routinely read none of them. They are the account agreement — often called terms of service or an end-user licence agreement — the classification decision, and the in-game price list. Each answers a different question, and each takes ten to twenty minutes.

The agreement tells you what you are promising and what the vendor is promising. The classification tells you what the content is and who it was classified as suitable for in Australia. The price list tells you where the money in Step 1's four shapes actually comes out.

You do not have to read any of them in full. This step is about knowing which paragraphs matter and where to find them, so that twenty minutes of reading is worth more than two hours of skimming.

Reading the account agreement without reading all of it

Find the agreement on the vendor's own site, usually linked in the footer or from the account creation screen. Open it, and use your browser's find function — Ctrl+F on Windows, Command+F on a Mac — to jump to the parts that affect you.

Search for these words in turn, and read the paragraph each one sits in.

• "terminate" or "suspend" — what can cause the vendor to close your account, and what happens to anything you paid for if they do.
• "refund" — whether purchases can be reversed, under what conditions, and within what period.
• "virtual" or "currency" — almost every agreement states that in-game currency and items are a licence to use, not property you own. Read the exact wording; it is the single most surprising paragraph for most new players.
• "age" or "minor" — the minimum age for an account, and whether a parent or guardian has to consent.
• "change" or "modify" — whether the vendor may change the agreement, the game or the shop, and how you would be told.
• "governing law" — which country's law the agreement nominates, which matters for how a dispute would proceed.

Six searches, six paragraphs. If a paragraph is written so densely that you cannot tell what it means, that is worth noting rather than guessing at; an agreement you cannot understand is a fact about the agreement.

Looking up the Australian classification

Computer games distributed in Australia are classified under the national classification scheme. The classification, and the consumer advice attached to it, are published, and you can look up a specific title yourself rather than relying on anybody's summary.

1. Open the Australian Classification Board website.
2. Use its search to find the title by name. Spell it as the vendor spells it.
3. Read the classification and, just as importantly, the consumer advice beneath it — the short phrases describing why the title was classified as it was.
4. If a title has been classified more than once, check the date on the entry you are reading; games are reclassified when they change substantially.
5. Write the classification and the consumer advice on your sheet.

We deliberately do not state any classification, rating or age figure for any specific game anywhere on this site. The Board publishes those, they change, and a third-party copy is the kind of thing that goes stale and misleads. The link above is the source.

If there is someone under eighteen in the household, the eSafety Commissioner publishes separate guidance for parents and carers on games, on the controls available in them, and on reporting harmful behaviour. It is written for people with no gaming background, which makes it a reasonable companion to this step.

Working out what the shop actually charges

The price list is the document most games make easiest to find once you are inside and hardest to find before. Look for a "store", "shop" or "premium" page on the vendor's own site; many publish it openly.

Four questions, in this order.

1. Is there a currency in between? If prices are shown in tokens rather than dollars, find the page that sells the tokens and work out what one dollar buys. Then price one thing you might actually want, in dollars, and write that number down. This single calculation defeats most of the confusion in the category.
2. Are the dollar prices Australian dollars? Vendors often display in United States dollars. If so, the amount on your card statement will be larger, and your bank may add a conversion fee of its own on top of the exchange rate.
3. Is anything recurring? Look for monthly or annual items, and for whether they renew automatically. If something renews, find the cancellation instructions before you buy it, not after.
4. Are there randomised purchases? If a listing promises an unknown item from a pool, there is no per-item price, only a per-attempt price. Treat the per-attempt price as the whole cost and assume nothing about what you get.

Your rights do not disappear because it is a game

An account agreement is a contract, and a contract offered to consumers in Australia operates alongside the Australian Consumer Law rather than instead of it. The ACCC publishes plain-language material on consumer guarantees and on what a business may and may not say about them.

Three general points follow, and they are general guidance rather than advice about your situation.

Consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law cannot be excluded by a term in an agreement. If an agreement says you have no rights at all, that statement does not make it so.

Digital products, including games and in-game purchases, are goods or services for the purposes of that law. A term saying all sales are final does not by itself remove a guarantee that would otherwise apply.

Misleading or deceptive conduct in trade or commerce is prohibited, and that applies to how a product is described and priced as much as to anything else. If a price, an inclusion or a limitation was described to you in a way that turned out not to be true, that is the kind of thing the ACCC publishes guidance about.

If something about an offer looks less like a business and more like a trap — a site other than the vendor's offering the same game, a payment page that arrived by email, a message demanding account details — the place to report it is Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre.

What the vendor learns about you

Creating an account means handing over at least an email address, and usually more: a username, a password, a date of birth, a country, and in time a payment method. The vendor's privacy policy is a fourth document, and while this course does not ask you to read it closely, it is worth opening long enough to answer two questions.

Who else receives the data — payment processors, analytics providers, advertising partners? And can you delete the account, and what does deletion actually remove? Both answers are usually present and brief.

In Australia, the OAIC oversees the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and publishes material on what organisations must do with personal information and how to make a privacy complaint. Our own practices are set out in full in the Privacy Policy for this site, which collects nothing beyond server logs and the contents of emails sent to us.

The worked example: the household reads

The hypothetical household spends one evening on Step 3. This is an illustration of the method; it is not a real family and it describes no product's results.

One adult does the six searches in the agreement and writes three sentences: the vendor may suspend the account for breaking the rules, in-game items are licensed rather than owned, and the agreement may change with notice. The second adult looks the title up on the Classification Board site and writes down the classification and the consumer advice exactly as published.

The shop takes them longest, because prices are in tokens. They find the token page, work out what forty Australian dollars buys, and discover the figure is smaller than either of them assumed. They also find one recurring item and write "renews — check cancellation" beside it.

At the end of the evening they make their first real decision: the fourteen-year-old's access will be discussed as a household matter rather than settled by one parent, and no purchase of any kind will be made in the first month. Both decisions were available to them for free, before installing anything.