About Valid Layer

Valid Layer publishes one thing: a five-step beginner's course about free-to-play PC games, written for readers in Australia. This page explains who publishes it, how it is put together, and what commercial relationship sits behind it.

The publisher

Valid Layer is published by:

Meljaro s. r. o.
Vinohradská 3216/165, Strašnice, 100 00 Praha 10, Czech Republic
Company registration: 07137010
info@validlayer.online

The course is written by the Meljaro s. r. o. editorial team. There is no named author and no instructor, because the course does not rest on anybody's reputation — it rests on the sources it links, which you can check yourself. There is no enrolment, no account, no certificate and no record of who has read what.

How the course was structured

The course was built backwards from a single question: what does somebody need to know, in what order, before they install a free online game for the first time?

That produced five decisions a new player actually has to make, and each one became a step. First, what kind of commercial arrangement they are entering. Second, whether the computer in the house can run the thing at all. Third, whether the content and the spending inside the game suit the household. Fourth, how to create an account without handing it to somebody else. Fifth, how to keep the hobby in proportion afterwards.

Each step ends in a checklist because a decision that is not written down tends not to survive contact with a download. The checklists are gathered on one page for printing.

What each step relies on

Three kinds of material, kept separate on purpose.

Australian government sources for anything touching classification, consumer rights, privacy, online safety or scams. Where a step makes a claim in those areas, it links the responsible body rather than restating the rule: the Australian Classification Board, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the eSafety Commissioner, Scamwatch and the Australian Cyber Security Centre. Those sites are current; a figure copied into a course page is not.

Vendors' own statements for anything about a specific product. What a game requires, what it sells and what platforms it runs on are facts the vendor publishes and may change. Where a vendor does not state something, the course says so instead of filling the gap.

General, checkable description for everything else — how a settings menu is usually laid out, what a requirements list usually contains, how a registration form usually works. These are written as general guidance rather than as instructions for one company's interface, which is also why the course contains no screenshots of anybody's product.

What the course deliberately does not contain

No test results, benchmarks or performance figures, because we run none and will not repeat somebody else's as though we had. No reviews, scores or recommendations of one game over another. No quotes, personal accounts or testimonials from readers. No statistics without a linked source. No claim that any product is the best, the safest or the most anything — those are opinions, and this is a course.

It also contains no form, no newsletter, no sign-up and no analytics. The site collects nothing from readers beyond the access log any web server keeps, which is described in the Privacy Policy.

The commercial relationship, stated plainly

This course carries paid affiliate links to one of the products it names. Crossout appears in Steps 1, 3 and 4 as a worked example, and the links to it are affiliate links: if a reader registers an account, confirms the email address and signs in through one of them, the affiliate network that operates the link pays Meljaro s. r. o. a commission. Readers pay nothing extra.

Saying that honestly means saying this too: a product we are paid to link is a product we have an interest in mentioning. Our protection against that interest distorting the course is structural rather than a promise of good character. The steps were written and sequenced before any product was attached to them. Every affiliate link carries a disclosure beside it, in body text, never collapsed. No step recommends the product, scores it, or compares it favourably with anything. And every factual statement about it comes from the vendor's own description — which is why Step 2 tells you to open the vendor's requirements page rather than trusting a copy of it here.

The full arrangement, including what decides the course content instead of commission, is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.

How often it is reviewed

The whole course is reviewed twice a year. It is also reviewed out of cycle whenever one of the linked government sources changes materially, or whenever a vendor changes a product detail the course relies on. The review date appears in the footer of every page, and it changes only when something was actually checked.

If you find something out of date, wrong, or unclear, the quickest way to get it fixed is to write to us at info@validlayer.online. Corrections are made to the page rather than announced; material changes to the legal pages are flagged at the top of those pages.

Who this is not

Valid Layer is not affiliated with any game publisher, is not an official or authorised source for any product, and is not a news outlet. It is a course published by a company that discloses how it is paid. If any page here reads otherwise, that is an error, and we would like to know about it.