What "free to play" actually means

A game that costs nothing to install still has to pay wages. This step explains where that money comes from, so that nothing in the next four steps is a surprise.

Why anybody gives away a game

A boxed game used to work like a book. You paid once, you owned a copy, and the people who made it were paid out of that one transaction. Online games broke that arrangement, because an online game is not a finished object. It is a service that has to keep running: servers in data centres, staff moderating behaviour, programmers producing new content for people who finished the old content months ago.

Charging once for something that costs money every day is difficult, so most large online games stopped charging at the door. Instead they let anyone in and earn from a minority of players who spend afterwards. That minority funds everyone else. It is not charity and it is not a trick: it is a business model, and it has consequences you can predict once you know which version of it you are looking at.

The practical consequence for you is this. When a game costs nothing to install, the interesting question is never "is it free?" It is "what is this game going to ask me for later, and when?" Everything else in Step 1 is a way of answering that question in advance.

Terms used from here on

Client: The program you install on your own computer. It draws the game and talks to the company's servers. The client is usually the free part.
Server: A computer the company runs, which holds the authoritative version of what is happening. If the servers are switched off, the client on your machine cannot be played.
Account: The record the company keeps of you: your login, what you own inside the game, and your history. Your progress lives on the account, not on your computer.
In-game purchase: Anything bought with real money after installation. Sometimes an item, sometimes an in-game currency you spend later, sometimes time-limited access to a feature.
Cosmetic: An item that changes how something looks and nothing else. A different paint scheme is cosmetic; a faster vehicle is not.

The four models you will meet

Almost every free online PC game earns in one of four ways, or in a blend of them. Learning to spot which one you are in takes a few minutes and saves a great deal of confusion later.

1. Cosmetic sales

The game sells appearance only. Players who spend look different and play identically. This model is the easiest to live with because nothing you can buy affects a match, so a household that spends nothing is never at a disadvantage. It is also the hardest to run, because the company has to make appearance alone worth paying for.

2. Progression acceleration

The game is built around earning things slowly. Everything is reachable by playing, and money shortens the wait. The usual forms are a paid boost that multiplies the progress you earn for a period, or a direct purchase of an item you would otherwise have to earn over several weeks.

This model is fair in the sense that nothing is locked behind money permanently, and uncomfortable in the sense that the free path is deliberately designed to feel slow. Your judgement about it should rest on whether the unpaid pace is still enjoyable. Play for a week before deciding; the first few hours of any game of this kind are generously paced on purpose.

3. Subscription or pass

A recurring charge gives extra rewards, a second progression track, or quality-of-life features for a month or a season. The charge is visible, predictable and easy to cancel, which makes it the model that is simplest to budget. Watch for passes that expire: a pass bought at the end of a season may not have time to deliver what it promises.

4. Randomised items

Real money, or an in-game currency bought with real money, produces an item that is drawn at random from a pool. You know the pool; you do not know which item you will get. This is the model that attracts the most regulatory attention worldwide, and it is the one Step 3 treats in detail.

A note on the fifth model

A small number of free games earn from advertising shown inside the game rather than from purchases. This is common on phones and rare on desktop computers, so this course does not cover it. If you meet one, the question to ask is the same: what is it taking from me, and is that acceptable?

The words vendors use, and what they mean

Vendors describe these models with a vocabulary that is not always self-explanatory. Here are the terms you will see most often on a game's own pages, with plain readings.

Common vendor wording and a plain reading of it
What the page says	What it usually means
Free to play	No charge to create an account or install the client. Says nothing about later charges.
Premium currency	An in-game currency bought with real money. Prices inside the game are quoted in it, which makes real cost harder to see.
Battle pass / season pass	A paid track of rewards, usually time-limited, running alongside the free one.
Crate, case, container, bundle	Often a randomised item. "Bundle" sometimes means a fixed, listed set instead — check which.
Boost / accelerator	A multiplier on progress for a set period of time or number of matches.
Early access	The game is unfinished and being sold or given away while it changes. Features may be added or removed.

None of these words is dishonest. They are simply industry shorthand, and reading them as shorthand rather than as description is most of the skill. If a page describes a thing you are about to buy and you cannot say in one sentence what you will own afterwards, that is a reason to wait, not a reason to hurry.

What this looks like for the worked example household

Hypothetical household — illustration only

The Melbourne household from the homepage sits down with the teenager's shortlist of three games. For each one they open the game's own store page and try to answer a single question in writing: if nobody here ever spends a cent, what is the game like? One game answers clearly — appearance items only. One answers "slower, but complete". The third is vague, and the vagueness itself is the answer they record.

They are not deciding which game is best. They are deciding which ones they understand well enough to let into the house. Nobody has installed anything yet.

What the free model gives and what it takes

What it gives

You can try the thing properly before any money is involved, which a boxed game never allowed.
A large population of players, because the entry price is nothing — which matters in a game built around matching you with others.
Continuing development, because the game is funded by people who are still playing rather than by people who bought it once.
No commitment: stopping costs nothing and leaves no subscription behind, provided you have not started one.

What it takes

Attention. A game funded by later spending is designed to keep you present, because presence is what later spending grows from.
Clarity about cost. A real price is easy to compare; a stream of small purchases in a premium currency is not.
Permanence. Your progress sits on someone else's servers and is governed by their terms, not by ownership in the ordinary sense.
Patience, in the acceleration model, by design.

Where Australian law sits in all this

Two Australian frameworks matter to a reader of this step, and both are worth knowing exist even though neither will come up on your first evening.

The first is the Australian Consumer Law, administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. It applies to the way goods and services are described and sold to consumers in Australia, including digital products, and it is the reason a vendor's claims about what you are buying are not merely marketing. The ACCC publishes guidance on consumer rights and on how to make a complaint.

The second is classification. Computer games distributed in Australia are classified under a national scheme administered by the Australian Classification Board, which publishes both the classification marking and the consumer advice that goes with it. Step 3 shows you how to find and read both. We give no age threshold or legal figure here that we cannot link to a source for.

The product used as this course's example

World of Tanks, the game this course refers to by name, is described by its affiliate programme as an online multiplayer tank action game in which players take part in team battles against other players, running on desktop computers — Windows, macOS and Linux. The programme pays this site a commission when a reader creates and activates an account. Which of the four models above it uses, and on what terms, is not something the programme states to us, so we do not state it to you: Step 3 shows you how to read that off the vendor's own pages yourself.

Visit the World of Tanks websitePaid affiliate link. Multi.kuk.shop s.r.o. is paid a commission if you create and activate an account after following it; your cost is unchanged either way.

Step 1 checklist

Work through this before Step 2

Pick one free game you are curious about and open its own website, not a third-party page about it.
Find the page that describes what can be bought. It is usually called the store, the shop or the in-game purchases page.
Write down, in one sentence, which of the four models it uses: cosmetic sales, progression acceleration, subscription or pass, or randomised items.
Write down whether purchases are priced in dollars or in a premium currency. If it is a currency, note what the smallest real-money top-up costs in AUD.
Answer in writing: if nobody in this household ever spends anything, what is the game like?
If you cannot answer that question from the vendor's own pages, record that you could not. That is a finding, not a failure.
Note whether the game advertises a subscription or a season pass, and whether it says when a pass expires.
Decide now, before you are invested, the maximum amount per month anyone in the household may spend in this game.

Before you move on

You should now be able to look at any free game and name its business model out loud. You do not yet know whether your computer can run it, and you have not created anything. Step 2 is the hardware step, and it is the one most likely to rule a game out — which is why it comes before the exciting part.