Step 1 of 5

What “free to play” actually asks of you

A game that costs nothing to install is still a business. This step explains what the business is, so that the rest of the course is about decisions rather than suspicions. Reading time is about fifteen minutes.

What the phrase means, precisely

“Free to play” means there is no purchase price. You download the game, you create an account, and you can play without a card ever being charged. That part is literal and it is not a trick.

What the phrase does not mean is that there is nothing to buy. Almost every game distributed this way has something purchasable inside it, and the design of the game is shaped around that fact. Noticing the difference between those two statements is most of what Step 1 is for.

It also does not mean the game is free of cost to you in other senses. It occupies storage space on your computer. It uses electricity. It consumes internet data every time it updates, and large games update often. If you are on a plan with a monthly data allowance, that is a real cost measured in gigabytes rather than dollars, and Step 2 deals with it.

There is one more thing the phrase does not mean: that the game will remain available. A game you buy on a disc stays on the disc. A free-to-play game that depends on the publisher's servers is playable for as long as those servers run. That is not a reason to avoid them, but it is a reason not to think of in-game purchases as things you own in the way you own a kettle. Your rights as a consumer in Australia are set out under the Australian Consumer Law, which the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission administers, and which applies to digital products supplied to Australian consumers.

The four things a free game wants from you

Instead of a price, a game distributed this way generally asks for some combination of four things. It is worth being able to name them, because the rest of the course is about handling each one deliberately.

An account. Nearly all of these games require you to register before you play, which usually means giving an email address and choosing a password, and often confirming the address by clicking a link sent to it. The account is what lets the game remember your progress between sessions, and it is also what lets the publisher count you. Step 3 is entirely about what you are agreeing to when you do this.

Your attention, repeatedly. The business depends on players coming back. Games built this way typically include daily rewards, timed events and progress that accumulates when you play regularly. None of that is sinister in itself, but it is designed, and it is designed to make returning feel better than not returning. Knowing that in advance makes it easier to decide your own pattern rather than inherit one.

Time, as the alternative to money. In most of these games anything purchasable can also be earned by playing. The exchange rate between hours and dollars is the core design decision of the whole genre. A game where forty hours of play equals ten dollars feels very different from one where forty hours equals two hundred. You cannot usually find this number published anywhere, but you can estimate it after a few sessions, and Step 5 shows how.

Money, eventually, from some players. Only a minority of players of any free-to-play game spend anything at all. The business works because that minority spends enough to cover everyone. This is why Step 5 asks you to set your own limit before you are attached to anything: the design assumes you will not have one.

Three ways these games make money

Three patterns cover most of what you will meet. A single game often uses two or three of them at once.

Cosmetic sales. You pay for things that change how something looks and nothing else — colours, paint schemes, decorative parts, animations. A player who never spends is at no disadvantage in play. This is the pattern players tend to object to least.

Convenience and acceleration. You pay to get something sooner than you otherwise would: a faster rate of progress, a skipped waiting period, more storage for your items. Everything remains obtainable without paying; money buys time. Whether this feels fair depends entirely on how slow the unpaid route is.

Randomised items. You pay for a chance at something rather than for the thing itself — a container, a crate, a pack whose contents are decided at the moment you open it. This is the pattern that attracts the most attention from regulators and from parents, because the structure resembles a wager even when no money can come back out. Step 5 covers it properly, including where Australian classification information is published. If a household includes someone under 18, this is the pattern to understand before anything is installed, and the eSafety Commissioner publishes general material for families on online experiences.

The example used in this course

So the steps are not abstract, the course points at one game throughout. Crossout is described by its vendor as a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game set in post-apocalyptic realities, in which the central element is vehicles that players build themselves. The vendor states that the game offers many ways to modify a vehicle: its shape and armour, its armament and support systems, and aesthetic accessories.

Two further facts come from the vendor and are used later in the course. The game runs on Windows and on Linux; it is not offered for macOS, which matters in Step 2. And creating an account involves confirming the email address you register with and then signing in, which matters in Step 3.

Beyond those points this course does not claim to know how the game plays, what it costs to progress, or how its purchasable items are structured. Where the vendor does not state something, the course says the vendor does not state it. That is a deliberate limit: the publisher of this site has a commercial relationship with the game through an affiliate link and is therefore not a neutral source about its quality.

Visit the Crossout websitePaid affiliate link. Blank Index is paid a commission if you create and confirm an account after following it. You can complete every step of this course without using it.

Words you will meet from here on

The example household, at Step 1

What is good and what is not about the model

Checklist 1 — before you move to Step 2