Step 4 — Making an account and installing

Step 4 of 5 · Berth 14-2

The source is the whole of the safety question

Almost everything that goes wrong when someone installs a large game goes wrong before the installation starts, at the moment they choose where to get it from. A program obtained from the vendor who makes it, or from a major storefront the vendor publishes through, is the program the vendor wrote. A program obtained from a site that has repackaged it is something else, and nobody can tell you what it contains.

So the single discipline of this step is: start from the vendor's own address, typed or followed from a link you trust, and go nowhere else. Not a search result advertising a faster copy. Not a video description. Not a file sent by someone helpful.

Three signs that you are not on the vendor's own site, in rough order of reliability. The address in the browser's bar is not the vendor's domain, which is the only one of the three that is close to conclusive. The page offers a "crack", a "modded client", a "free premium" variant or paid content made available at no charge. And the page asks you to disable your security software before continuing, which no legitimate installer for a game needs you to do.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general guidance for individuals on software and device security, and it is the sort of material worth reading once rather than at the moment you need it.

Setting up the account itself

An account is created on the vendor's site with an email address and a password, sometimes with a username and a date of birth as well. A few ordinary decisions here save trouble later.

Use an email address you can still sign in to, and will still have in three years. Account recovery runs through email, and an address you have lost is an account you have lost.

Use a password unique to this account. Game accounts hold payment methods and get targeted; a password shared with your email or your bank turns one problem into three. A password manager is the ordinary way to manage this, and your browser and your operating system both include one.

Turn on two-factor authentication if the vendor offers it. This is the setting that converts a stolen password from a disaster into an inconvenience, and it usually sits under security or account settings.

Do not add a payment method during setup if the vendor lets you skip it. Step 5 covers spending deliberately; adding a card before you have played is making a decision at the least informed moment available to you.

The installation procedure, in general terms

What follows applies to large desktop games generally. It is not a walkthrough of any particular vendor's screens, because those screens are redesigned regularly and a stale walkthrough is worse than none. Expect the order below, in roughly this shape, with different wording.

1. Check your sheet. Put the six numbers from Step 2 in front of you and confirm the vendor's current requirements page still matches what you wrote. Requirements change between versions.
2. Check the space. Confirm the drive you are installing to has the published size plus half again. Running a drive to within a gigabyte of full slows a whole computer down, not just the game.
3. Start from the vendor's own address. Confirm the domain in the browser bar before you obtain anything.
4. Obtain the vendor's own installer or launcher. It will usually be a small file that fetches the rest. Note where your browser saved it.
5. Let your operating system check it. Windows and macOS both inspect new programs; let them finish and read what they say rather than clicking past it.
6. Run it and read each screen. This is where extra software is offered. The next section is about that.
7. Choose the install location deliberately. If you have a second, larger drive, this is the moment to use it. Changing it afterwards means reinstalling.
8. Let the main download finish. This is the long part — tens of gigabytes is normal — and it is where your data allowance from Step 2 gets used. Do it when nobody else needs the connection.
9. Sign in with the account you made. Not a new one created inside the installer, if you can avoid it; one account per person is enough.
10. Stop and look at the settings before playing. Picture quality, volume, and any privacy or chat options. Step 5 goes through these properly.

If the procedure stops with an error you do not understand, the vendor's own support pages are the place to look. Searching the exact error text often lands on forum posts of unknown provenance, which is a poor place to be told to run something.

Extra software, and how to decline it

Installers sometimes offer additional programs: a browser extension, a toolbar, a different search provider, a second game, a "game booster" or "optimiser". These offers are usually legal, usually disclosed and usually pre-ticked.

Decline all of them. Not because any particular one is harmful, but because you cannot evaluate them at that moment and you did not come for them. Anything genuinely useful will still be available tomorrow, when you can read about it properly.

Practically, that means three habits. Read every screen rather than clicking Next by reflex. Choose "custom" or "advanced" when offered, because the extras are hidden behind "express". And untick anything that is not the game itself, including options described as recommended.

One category deserves naming. Programs that promise to speed up, clean or optimise your computer for games are a long-standing genre, and the honest general position is that a modern operating system manages its own resources and the gains claimed are not something a vendor's installer can substantiate to you in a pop-up. Declining them costs you nothing you can measure.

Installing on a computer other people use

If the computer is shared, the install is a household matter and worth five minutes of conversation before, rather than a discovery afterwards.

Decide whose account it is. An account tied to one person's email, played by three people, becomes a problem the first time a password reset is needed.

Decide whether separate user accounts on the computer make sense. Both Windows and macOS support them, and they keep settings, saves and browser sessions apart without any extra software.

If anyone in the house is under eighteen, decide the access question before the install rather than after. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance on the parental controls available in operating systems and in games, and on how to approach the conversation. We do not state any age threshold ourselves; the classification you looked up in Step 3 is the published starting point.

What a problem looks like, and what it does not

Nothing on this page, and nothing anywhere on this site, inspects your computer or reports anything about it. We cannot see your machine and we would not tell you it was in trouble.

A real problem after installing a game looks mundane: the game will not start, the picture stutters, a patch fails to download, the fans run loud. Those are support questions for the vendor, and they are routine.

What is not routine, and is worth attention, is a message arriving outside the game that claims your device has been infected, that your account will be closed unless you confirm your password, or that a prize is waiting. Those arrive by email and in chat, they imitate vendors, and they are reportable to Scamwatch. A vendor does not ask for your password, and a game does not scan your computer and present you with a bill.

The worked example: installation evening

The hypothetical household reaches Step 4 on a Thursday. This is an illustration of the procedure, not an account of a real installation or a real product.

They re-check the requirements page against their sheet and find the published figures unchanged. They confirm 94 GB free against a published size well under that, which satisfies the plus-half rule. One adult creates the account on the vendor's site using the existing email address, sets a password from the browser's password manager, turns on two-factor authentication, and skips the payment method entirely.

The installer offers one extra program with a pre-ticked box. They untick it, having read the sentence next to it. The main download runs for most of the evening, which they had planned for by starting it after the fourteen-year-old finished homework.

At the end, nothing is played. They stop at the settings screen, which is where Step 5 begins. Their note for the evening is two lines long: account made under one adult's email, no card attached.