Step 1 of 5

Step 1 — What "free to play" actually means

A game that costs nothing to download still has to pay the people who make it. This step explains where that money comes from, and why the answer changes how the game is built.

Three ways a game asks for money

Nearly every PC game you will meet uses one of three arrangements, and telling them apart is the single most useful thing you can learn before installing anything.

The first is the one most people over thirty grew up with: you pay once, you own a copy, and the copy is yours. A disc, or now a download, in exchange for a single price. Nothing further is asked of you, although the publisher may later sell you a larger add-on.

The second is subscription. You pay a recurring amount — monthly or yearly — and keep access for as long as you keep paying. It is the arrangement you already know from a streaming service, applied to a game.

The third is free to play. The game itself is given away. You download it, you create an account, and you play without paying anything. The publisher's income comes from a minority of players who choose to buy optional items once they are already playing. These items are usually cosmetic — a different colour, a different shape, a decorative part — or they save time that could otherwise be spent earning the same thing by playing.

Crossout, which this course uses as a worked example, is in the third group. The vendor describes it as a free-to-play online game set in post-apocalyptic surroundings, in which players build their own combat vehicles and modify them: the shape, the armour, the weapons, the support systems and the decorative parts. Everything else about how it charges, we leave to the vendor to state.

What the word "free" covers, and what it does not

"Free to play" is a precise term with a narrow meaning. It means the client — the program you install on your computer — costs nothing, and that you can play the game without paying. That is the whole of it.

It does not mean there is nothing to buy. In almost every free-to-play game there is a shop, and the shop is reachable from inside the game. It does not mean the game will stay free forever, although publishers who change this are rare and usually loud about it. And it does not mean there is no cost to you at all: your time is a cost, your electricity is a cost, and your attention is the thing the design is competing for.

It is also worth separating "free to play" from two words that sound similar. A demo is a limited slice of a paid game, offered so you can decide whether to buy the rest. A free weekend is a paid game opened to everybody for a few days. Neither is free to play; both end.

Why the business model shows up in the design

A paid-once game has to be good enough to recommend at the moment of purchase. After that, the publisher has your money whether you play for two hours or two hundred.

A free-to-play game has the opposite incentive. It has nothing at the moment of download, so it is built to keep you present: to give you a reason to come back tomorrow, to make progress visible, to offer something to work towards. Daily rewards, progression tracks that reset on a schedule, and limited-time events all exist because returning players are the only players who might one day buy something.

None of this is sinister, and it is not a reason to avoid the category. It is simply useful to recognise, because the design is tuned to be habit-forming in the ordinary sense of the word. A player who understands why a game is nudging them is in a better position than one who does not. Step 5 turns that understanding into a practical limit on time and money.

The second consequence is that the game keeps changing. A paid-once game is finished when it ships. A free-to-play game is updated for as long as it makes money, which means the version you install this month is not the version you installed last month. New parts, new modes and new shop items arrive on a schedule.

Online games are services, not objects

This is the idea most newcomers find unfamiliar, and it is worth sitting with for a moment.

When you install an online free-to-play game, you are not buying a thing. You are opening an account with a company, agreeing to its terms, and being granted access to a service that runs on that company's servers. Your vehicles, your progress and your purchased items live on those servers, not on your hard drive.

Three practical consequences follow. The game can be changed without asking you, because you do not own a copy to preserve. The game requires an internet connection to play at all, because the game is not really on your computer. And if the service is ever shut down, access ends — which is why the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's guidance on digital products and consumer guarantees is worth knowing about before you spend anything, not after.

You can read the ACCC's material on consumer rights at accc.gov.au. It is the Commonwealth agency that administers the Australian Consumer Law, which applies to digital products sold to Australian consumers alongside physical ones.

The household in the spare room

The hypothetical household introduced on the home page — a couple in suburban Adelaide with a five-year-old Windows desktop — starts here, with a conversation rather than a download.

Their teenager has asked for a free vehicle-combat game. One of the adults assumes "free" is a trick and that a credit card will be required at some point. The other assumes free means no money will ever change hands. Both are wrong in the same way: they are guessing at an arrangement they could simply read.

So they do what this step suggests. They establish which of the three models the game uses. They establish that the shop exists and sits inside the game. They do not yet know what is in it — that is Step 3 — but they know it is there, and they know that nobody in the house can spend anything without a payment method, which they control.

That is the whole of their first evening's work. Nothing is installed. Nothing is decided about whether the game is suitable. They have simply replaced two guesses with one fact.

The words you will meet

Client

The program installed on your computer that connects to the game's servers. In a free-to-play game, the client is the part that costs nothing.

Free to play

A game you can download and play without paying, funded by optional purchases made by some players.

Cosmetic item

Something bought for appearance alone — a colour, a decoration, a shape — with no effect on how the game plays.

In-game shop

The storefront inside the game where optional items are sold, usually for a virtual currency bought with real money.

Virtual currency

Points or coins bought with real money and spent inside the game. One step of separation between your money and the purchase.

Live service

A game that is updated continuously and runs on the publisher's servers, rather than being finished at release.

Before you move on

You should now be able to say which of the three money arrangements a given game uses, and to explain why a free game still has a shop in it. You should also be comfortable with the idea that you are opening an account with a company, not buying an object.

Step 2 leaves the business side behind and gets practical: whether the computer you have can run the game you are considering.