Step 1 of 5
What "free-to-play" means and where the money actually is
A game can be genuinely free to download and play and still be built around getting money out of some of the people who play it. This step explains how that works, so that nothing later surprises you.
What the phrase promises, exactly
"Free-to-play" is a description of the price of entry and nothing else. It means you can obtain the game and play it without handing over money at the start. It is not a statement that the game contains no paid items, and it is not a statement that you will have the same experience as someone who spends.
That distinction matters because the two readings lead to very different expectations. Someone who reads "free" as "there is no money in this at all" will feel misled the first time a menu offers them a purchase. Someone who reads it as "the entry fee is zero, and the business model is somewhere else" is simply not surprised.
The second reading is the accurate one. A game studio has wages to pay and servers to run, and if the download costs nothing, the revenue comes from somewhere further along. Knowing where is the whole content of this step.
The four places a cost can appear
Across the free-to-play games you are likely to meet on a desktop computer, paid elements tend to fall into four groups. A single game might use one of them or all four.
| Type | What you are buying | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Cosmetic items | Appearance only: paint, decals, shapes, decorations that do not change how the game plays. | Usually the least consequential, but the prices still add up and are often shown in a made-up currency. |
| Time savers | Progress you would otherwise earn by playing: faster access to equipment, extra daily rewards, bonus resources. | Ask how slow the unpaid version is. A game can be free and still be designed so that free is tedious. |
| Capability items | Equipment, characters or upgrades that measurably affect outcomes against other players. | The point at which "free-to-play" and "competitive on equal terms" can come apart. |
| Randomised items | A chance at something, rather than the thing itself: crates, cases, packs with variable contents. | Covered properly in Step 4. This is the category to understand before anyone in the house spends. |
There is a fifth thing that is not a purchase but is still a cost: your attention and your time. A game designed around daily log-ins is asking for a recurring slice of your week. That is a legitimate thing to want from a hobby, and it is also a legitimate thing to decide against. It is worth naming because it does not show up on any price list.
Why so many games are built this way
An up-front price is a wall. Most people will not pay thirty dollars to find out whether they like something, which means a paid game has to spend heavily on persuading them before they ever play. Removing the price removes the wall, and the studio instead gets a large number of players, a small share of whom spend money.
The consequence for you is that the game is designed to be easy to start and to keep going. Nothing about that is sinister on its own. It does mean the first hour is unusually generous, and that judgements you form in that hour may not hold at hour twenty. Step 5 comes back to this.
It also means your account itself has value to the studio: an account that logs in is a player who might eventually spend, which is why registration and email confirmation are nearly always the first thing a free game asks for. Step 3 deals with doing that part carefully.
The words you will keep meeting
- Client
- The program you install on your own computer. The game also runs on the studio's servers; the client is your end of it.
- Premium currency
- An in-game token bought with real money and spent inside the game. Because it is sold in fixed bundles, the amount you buy rarely matches the amount you need, which is deliberate.
- Battle pass or season pass
- A set of rewards released over a fixed period, usually with a free track and a paid track. Buying one creates a reason to play before it expires.
- Grind
- Repetitive play done to accumulate something. How much grinding a game expects is the clearest signal of how hard it is pushing its time savers.
- Microtransaction
- Any small in-game purchase. The word describes the size of each payment, not the size of the total.
- MMO
- Massively multiplayer online: a game where large numbers of people share the same persistent world or matchmaking pool, rather than playing alone.
How to read a store page in five minutes
A five-minute reading routine
- Find the words the publisher uses for the price. "Free to play", "free download" and "free trial" are three different promises, and only the first two mean the game itself costs nothing.
- Look for a list of in-app or in-game purchases. Storefronts commonly disclose this near the price. If a page says purchases exist, assume they are central to the design rather than incidental.
- Find the classification marking and the content descriptors. Step 4 explains how to check these against the Australian register rather than trusting the storefront alone.
- Read the system requirements, including the supported operating systems. Step 2 is entirely about this, and it is the most common reason a free game turns out to be unusable.
- Find the publisher's own description of what the game is. Not a review, not a video, not a forum summary — the sentence the people who made it chose to write.
- Look for the account requirement. If the game needs a registration and a confirmed email address, you want to decide which address before you are halfway through a form.
Five minutes spent on those six points will tell you more than an hour of watching other people play. None of them requires you to install anything.
A worked example: one named game
An abstract routine is hard to hold onto, so here is the routine applied to a single real game. It appears in this course because the publisher of this site has an affiliate arrangement relating to it, and that is stated rather than hidden.
Crossout is described by its vendor as a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game set in post-apocalyptic realities. The central element is the vehicle: players construct their own machines and then modify them, covering shape, armour, armament, support systems and a range of aesthetic accessories. The vendor's description presents the number of possible modifications as the main thing the game offers.
Applying the routine: the price of entry is stated as free to play. The supported platforms are desktop Windows and Linux — the vendor does not offer a macOS version, so a Mac is simply out, which Step 2 returns to. Getting in requires creating an account, confirming the email address attached to it, and then logging in to the game. On the detail of what in-game purchases exist and what they cost, the vendor's description quoted here does not state this, so this course does not either; you would check that on the vendor's own site, using the routine above.
Paid affiliate link. ISWORK s.r.o. may be paid a commission if you register an account after following it. The link does not change what this step says, and you can complete the step without using it.
That example is here to make the method concrete. The same six questions work on any free-to-play game you come across, and the answers will differ.
How this is allowed to be described in Australia
Businesses selling to Australian consumers are subject to the Australian Consumer Law, which prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct and false representations about goods and services. The regulator that administers it is the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its website is where the current guidance sits.
In practice that means a game described as free-to-play should actually be playable without payment, and claims about what a purchase gives you should be accurate. It does not mean a game must be enjoyable without paying, or that the free version must be competitive. That is a design choice, not a legal one, and it is on you to judge.
If you believe a game has been described misleadingly, the ACCC takes reports through its website. Reporting is not the same as making a complaint on your own behalf, and the ACCC explains the difference on its own pages.
The share house, at Step 1
Hypothetical example
Back to the invented share house with one desktop computer in the lounge room. This is an illustration of the method, not a real household, and it makes no claim about any game's results.
One housemate finds a free game and wants to install it tonight. The housemate who was once stung by a forgotten subscription asks the obvious question: free how? Working through the five-minute routine together takes them about eight minutes, because they stop to argue about the difference between a cosmetic item and a capability item.
What they end up with is not a decision about the game. It is a shared understanding that the install costs nothing, that purchases exist inside it, and that they will look at the classification and the spending question properly before anyone's card goes anywhere near it. That is exactly what Step 1 is supposed to produce.
Before you move on
Before you move on
- "Free-to-play" describes the entry price only. It says nothing about what exists inside the game.
- Paid elements usually fall into four groups: cosmetic, time-saving, capability and randomised. Randomised items get their own treatment in Step 4.
- Your time is a real cost that no price list shows.
- Six questions, answerable in five minutes, tell you most of what a store page can tell you.
- If the vendor does not state something, treat it as unknown rather than filling the gap with an assumption.
Step 1 checklist
Work through these before Step 2
- Write down, in your own words, what you expect the game to cost you over the next three months. Keep it; you will compare against it at Step 5.
- Open the store or vendor page for a game you are considering and find the exact wording it uses about price.
- Find whether that page discloses in-game purchases, and note which of the four types they appear to be.
- Find the vendor's own one-paragraph description of the game and read it instead of a review.
- Note the supported operating systems. If your computer's system is not listed, stop here and read Step 2 before anything else.
- Note whether an account and a confirmed email address are required to play.
- Decide now whether this is a game you would play if nothing in it could ever be bought. Your answer is useful either way.
The All checklists page gathers this list with the other four, in a form that prints cleanly.