Step 1 — What free-to-play means, and what it does not

A game that costs nothing to install is still a business. This step explains where its money comes from, so that nothing later in the course surprises you.

The words you will meet

Before anything else, here are the terms this course uses. Each is defined once, here, and then used plainly for the rest of the five steps.

Free-to-play: A business model in which a game can be installed and played without an upfront purchase, and the publisher earns revenue from optional purchases made later by some players.
Client: The program that runs on your own computer. It draws the picture, reads your mouse and keyboard, and talks to the publisher's servers.
Server: A computer run by the publisher that holds the authoritative version of the game world and of your account. Your progress lives there, not on your machine.
Account: The record the publisher keeps of you: a login, usually an email address, and everything attached to it.
In-game currency: Points or tokens that can be spent inside the game. Some kinds are earned by playing; some are bought with real money. Many games use both, with different names.
Cosmetic: An item that changes how something looks and nothing else. The opposite is an item that changes how something performs.
Randomised item: A purchase whose contents are not known in advance and are decided by chance when it is opened. Step 5 returns to these at length.
Patch: An update to the client, downloaded automatically or on request, that changes or fixes part of the game.

The four places the money comes from

A large online game is expensive to make and expensive to keep running: servers cost money every day, and so do the people who maintain them. If you are not paying at the door, revenue is arriving by some other route. In this category it is usually one or more of four.

One: cosmetic purchases. Players buy things that change appearance only — a colour scheme, a decoration, a name effect. Nothing about the way the game plays changes. This is the gentlest version of the model, because a player who never spends is not at a disadvantage in the game itself, only in how their things look.

Two: convenience purchases. Players buy time. A thing that can be earned by playing for twenty hours can instead be bought in a minute. Nothing is exclusive to payers, but the pace differs. Whether this feels acceptable depends almost entirely on how much time you have, which is why Step 5 asks you to think about your time budget alongside your money budget.

Three: progression or access purchases. Players buy things that are not purely cosmetic and not purely time-saving — an item, a unit or a tier that affects what happens in a match. Games vary enormously in how far they take this, and the difference between "you can buy a shortcut" and "you can buy an advantage" is the single most useful question to ask about any product in this category.

Four: subscriptions and passes. A recurring charge, usually monthly or per season, that bundles a set of benefits. These are the easiest purchases to forget about, which is why Step 5's checklist includes a line about finding and reviewing recurring charges.

Most products combine several of these. You cannot tell from the install page which combination a given game uses. You can usually tell within the first hour of playing, and reliably by reading the publisher's own store page, which is a thing the course asks you to do at Step 3 rather than guessing.

What "no purchase price" does not mean

Three honest clarifications, because the phrase does a lot of work in advertising and very little in practice.

It does not mean the game is cheap to run. Your electricity, your internet connection and the wear on your computer are real costs, small but not zero. A large online game is one of the heavier things a home computer does.

It does not mean the game asks nothing of you. It asks for an email address, a password and, in most cases, a verified contact point. It will also ask for your attention, repeatedly and by design, because attention is what the model converts into revenue. Noticing that is not cynicism; it is just reading the business model correctly.

And it does not mean a refund is impossible or unnecessary to think about. Australian Consumer Law guarantees apply to goods and services supplied to consumers in Australia, including digital products, and the ACCC publishes guidance on what those guarantees cover. If you do eventually spend money, you have not waived anything by having installed the thing for nothing.

A note on the word "free"

This course avoids describing any particular product as free, because the terms attached to the word differ from product to product and only the vendor can state them. Where we talk about a model, we are describing how the category generally works, not making a claim about any one game's pricing.

Client, server and account: three separate things

A lot of beginner confusion comes from treating an online game as one object. It is three, and they fail in different ways.

The client sits on your hard drive. It is the part that has system requirements, the part that takes up storage space, and the part that gets patched. If the picture is choppy or the game will not start, the client and your hardware are the place to look. Step 2 is entirely about this part.

The server is somewhere else, usually in a data centre chosen per region. The distance between you and it is the main reason an Australian player sometimes sees a delay that a European player does not. If other players seem to teleport, or your actions take a moment to register, that is usually the connection to the server and not your computer. Step 4 shows how to tell the two apart, which saves people from buying hardware they did not need.

The account is a record, and it is the only one of the three you cannot replace. A broken client can be reinstalled. A bad server day passes. An account that has been taken over by someone else is a genuine problem, and the only reliable defences are a password you use nowhere else and two-factor authentication. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes plain-language guidance on both, and it is worth reading before Step 4 rather than after.

The trade-offs of the model

It is a model with real advantages and real costs, and a beginner is better served by seeing both than by being told it is simply good or simply predatory.

In its favour

You can find out whether you enjoy something before paying for it, which is not true of a boxed purchase.
A large shared player population means matches fill quickly, including at odd hours in an Australian time zone.
Ongoing revenue tends to mean ongoing updates rather than an abandoned product.
Spending genuinely can be zero, and for a large share of players it is.

Against it

The design is tuned to make purchases feel timely, which is a pressure you did not agree to in advance.
Costs are spread out and therefore harder to total up than a single price.
Randomised purchases make the real cost of a specific item impossible to know beforehand.
Progress is held on someone else's server under terms they can change.

Neither column is a verdict. They are the two lists to hold in your head while you read the remaining four steps.

What Australian law says about the words used

Two things are worth knowing at this stage, both phrased as general guidance rather than legal advice.

First, misleading or deceptive conduct in trade or commerce is prohibited under the Australian Consumer Law, and that applies to how a game is advertised and described as much as to anything else sold here. The ACCC is the body that enforces it and publishes guidance on what it means in practice. That principle binds this website too, which is why the course is careful about the claims it makes.

Second, computer games sold or distributed in Australia are classified under a national scheme administered by the Australian Classification Board. A classification is an age-suitability decision with published consumer advice attached to it. Step 3 shows you how to look one up. This course does not state any rating or age threshold for any particular title, because the Board's own database is the source and it is free to search.

Before you move on

A game with no purchase price earns money from cosmetics, convenience, progression, subscriptions, or a mix of those.
The useful question about any product in this category is how far its purchases reach into what happens in a match.
Client, server and account are three separate things that fail in three different ways.
Your account is the irreplaceable one. Protect it with a unique password and two-factor authentication.
Consumer guarantees under Australian Consumer Law still apply to money you spend later.

Checklist 1 — Understanding the model

I can say, in one sentence, how a game with no purchase price makes money.
I have decided which of the four revenue routes I would find acceptable and which I would not.
I know the difference between a cosmetic item and one that changes how the game plays.
I understand that my progress lives on the publisher's server, not on my computer.
I know that my account is the part I cannot replace.
I have read, or bookmarked, the Australian Cyber Security Centre's guidance on passwords and two-factor authentication.
I have written down a three-month spending figure in AUD, even if it is zero.
I understand that nothing in this course requires me to buy anything.