Step 1 — What "free to play" actually means
Step 1 of 5 · about eight minutes to read
The word "free" is doing a lot of work
A large share of online multiplayer games on desktop computers have no purchase price. You go to the publisher's website, make an account, download a client — the program that runs on your own machine and talks to the publisher's servers — and you are playing. No card, no receipt, no box.
That is genuinely different from buying a game outright, and it is worth understanding before you decide anything. The usual phrase for it is free to play. The phrase is accurate about the entry price and silent about everything after it, which is the part this step is for.
Nothing here is an argument against these games. Plenty of people play them for years and spend nothing. The point is that a business with no purchase price still has to pay for servers, staff and electricity, and knowing how it does that tells you more about what your next few months will look like than any review could.
The three places the money comes from
Across this whole category, revenue comes from some mix of three things. Most games use all three at once, weighted differently.
1. Cosmetic items
These change how something looks and nothing else — a paint scheme, a decal, a different-looking version of equipment you already have. A purely cosmetic item cannot affect the outcome of a match. If a game's revenue leans mostly on cosmetics, a player who never spends is not at a disadvantage in play, only in appearance.
2. Convenience and progression
Games in this category are built around slow accumulation: you play matches, you earn in-game currency and experience, and over many hours you gain access to more equipment. Convenience purchases shorten that. They might multiply the experience you earn, grant in-game currency directly, or make something available immediately that would otherwise take weeks.
This is the category to look at hardest, because it is where "free" and "paid" players can genuinely diverge. The question to ask is not "can you buy progress?" but "can you buy something a free player cannot eventually earn?" Those are very different arrangements, and a game's own FAQ or support pages usually answer it plainly.
3. Randomised items
Some games sell containers whose contents are decided by chance — you pay a fixed amount and receive one of a set of possible items. The industry calls them loot boxes. They are the most contested part of this business model, and for good reason: the price is known in advance and the value received is not.
Australia has an active regulatory conversation about these. If you are deciding on behalf of a young person in your household, treat the presence of randomised paid items as a thing to check deliberately rather than discover later. Step 3 covers where to look and what the Australian Classification Board, which classifies games for sale and distribution in Australia, publishes about a title's content.
What an account actually commits you to
Making an account for an online game is a contract, in the ordinary sense: you agree to a set of terms, the publisher agrees to let you use a service, and either side can end the arrangement under conditions that are written down somewhere.
Three consequences of that are worth knowing on day one.
First, you do not own the account or its contents in the way you own a book. You hold a licence to use a service. If a publisher closes a game's servers, the service ends. This is normal across the whole category and it is written into every set of terms you will read.
Second, the account is a real credential that someone may want to steal, especially once it has had time or money put into it. That is why Step 4 spends most of its length on passwords and second factors rather than on gameplay.
Third, an account means a company holds some data about you — at minimum an email address, usually an IP address and a record of your sessions. The publisher's own privacy policy governs that, not this site's. If the publisher operates from overseas, your information may be handled outside Australia. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes general guidance on Australian privacy law and handles privacy complaints.
The words you will meet
- Client
- The program installed on your own computer. It draws the game and sends your inputs to the publisher's servers. It is usually several gigabytes and it updates often.
- Launcher
- A small program that logs you in, keeps the client updated, and starts it. Some publishers use their own, some use a third-party store's.
- Server
- The publisher's computer that actually decides what happens in a match. Where it sits geographically matters for how responsive the game feels in Australia.
- Ping or latency
- The time, in milliseconds, for a message to travel from your computer to the server and back. Lower is better. Distance sets a floor on it that no amount of money can move.
- In-game currency
- Points earned by playing, spent inside the game. Some games have a second currency bought with real money. Knowing which is which is the whole trick.
- Premium account or pass
- A time-limited paid status, usually monthly, that increases what you earn per match. It is a subscription in all but name, so it is worth treating as one.
- Grind
- Playing repeatedly to accumulate currency or experience. Not a criticism — it is the core loop of the genre. How much of it you enjoy is personal.
- Matchmaking
- The system that decides who you play against. Published explanations vary in detail from one game to the next.
The worked example: a flat with one old desktop
The household used throughout this course is two adults sharing a desktop computer bought about five years ago, in a flat in an Australian capital city, on an ordinary home internet connection. They are a teaching device, not real people, and they never report results from any product.
At Step 1 their task is only to decide what they are looking for. They talk it over and settle on three things. They want something they can play in half-hour pieces on weeknights. They are not interested in paying a monthly fee. And they want to know, before they start, whether not spending money will make the game steadily less fun.
Those three sentences are a specification. They give the rest of the course something to test against. Without them, the household would be reading requirements lists and terms of service with no idea what they were looking for.
Writing down your own version of those sentences is the first item on this step's checklist. It takes two minutes and it is the only part of Step 1 that cannot be done by reading.
What this arrangement gives you and what it costs
In your favour
- No purchase price, so trying it costs time and disk space rather than money.
- Leaving costs nothing, because you never paid an entry fee to write off.
- Large player populations, which generally means shorter waits to find a match.
- Regular free updates are normal in the category rather than exceptional.
Against it
- The design has a commercial interest in your time as well as your money.
- Prices inside the game are shown in in-game currency, which obscures the real cost.
- Randomised paid items, where present, make spending hard to predict.
- The service can change or end, and your account is a licence rather than property.
Neither column is a verdict. They are the two halves of the trade you are making, and a reader who can state both of them has got what Step 1 is for.
Before you move on
What Step 1 established
"Free to play" describes the entry price only. Revenue comes from cosmetics, convenience and progression, and randomised items, in some mix. An account is a licence governed by terms you can read, not a purchase. And you now have three sentences describing what you personally want, which every later step will be measured against.
Step 2 turns to your own machine. Have the computer you intend to play on in front of you, or at least know which one it is.
Checklist 1 — before you look at any particular game
Deciding what you are looking for
- Write down, in one sentence, how long a typical session would be for you on a normal weeknight.
- Write down whether a recurring monthly charge is something you would consider, or a firm no.
- Write down whether you mind spending many hours earning new equipment, or would rather that happened quickly.
- Decide, now, the maximum amount in AUD you would be willing to spend in a year on a game you have not played yet. Writing "zero" is a complete answer.
- Name the three revenue sources — cosmetics, convenience and progression, randomised items — without looking back at this page.
- Check whether anyone else in the household will use the same computer, and when.
- Decide whether a person under 18 will be playing. If so, plan to read Step 3 before Step 2.
- Keep the sheet. Steps 2, 3 and 5 all refer back to it.