What a free-to-play online game actually is
Step 1 of 5
Before anything is installed, it helps to understand the arrangement you are being offered. A game that asks for no money at the door is not a gift, and it is not a trick either. It is a business model, and once you can describe it you will read everything that follows — the terms, the shop, the account screen — far more easily.
The phrase, taken literally
"Free-to-play" is a description of one thing only: the price of entry. It means you can download the client — the program that runs on your computer — create an account and start playing without a payment. That is the whole of the promise. It says nothing about whether money will be offered to you later, how much content you can reach without paying, or how long anything takes.
It is worth separating that from two phrases it is often confused with. A free trial is time-limited: it ends, and then you pay or stop. A demo is content-limited in a fixed way: a few levels, then the full version is for sale. A free-to-play game is usually neither. It stays open indefinitely, and the paid parts sit alongside the free parts rather than behind a wall at the end of them.
Being clear about this early saves disappointment in both directions. Some readers arrive expecting a crippled version and find a complete game. Others arrive expecting everything to be free forever and are surprised by a shop. Neither expectation is accurate.
Where the money comes from instead
Running a large online game is expensive. There are servers to rent in several regions, staff to pay, and continual work on new content. If no one pays at the door, that cost is met in one of a small number of ways, and in practice it is met by a minority of players who spend, subsidising the majority who do not.
That subsidy is the key fact about the model, and it explains almost every design decision you will notice. The game needs a large population to fill its matches, so it wants you to play whether or not you pay. It also needs some of that population to spend, so the things money can buy are made visible. Both pressures are present at once, which is why these games feel generous and commercial at the same time.
Understanding this is not cynicism. It is the same arrangement as commercial radio or a free newspaper: somebody is paying, it is not you at the point of use, and knowing who is paying tells you what the product is optimising for.
The three ways payment is collected
Across the category, paid content tends to arrive in three shapes. A particular game may use one, two or all three, and the names differ between titles.
Cosmetic items
Appearance only: a different colour scheme, a decoration, a nameplate. These change nothing about how the game plays. They are the least consequential form of spending, and the easiest to decline, because declining costs you nothing but the look.
Convenience and progression
Paying to advance faster: a temporary bonus to the points you earn, a slot that would otherwise be earned over time, an item set that saves a few weeks of play. The thing bought was reachable without money; what was bought is the time. This is the category where a household budget matters most, because the purchases are small, repeatable and tied to impatience.
Subscriptions and passes
A recurring charge, monthly or seasonal, bundling bonuses and often a set of rewards unlocked by playing during that season. The important question with any recurring charge is where it is cancelled and how long the current period runs. Step 5 comes back to this.
A fourth shape exists and deserves its own section, because Australian readers have particular reasons to think about it.
Randomised items, and why Australia cares
Some games sell containers whose contents are not known until they are opened — commonly called loot boxes. You pay a fixed amount and receive a randomly selected item from a pool. The game may also award these containers for free as you play, which means a player can encounter them without ever having spent.
Randomised purchasing has had sustained attention from Australian regulators and parliamentary committees, and classification arrangements for games containing paid randomised items have changed in recent years. Rather than paraphrase rules that move, the honest thing to do is point you at the body that publishes them: the Australian Classification Board publishes the classification applied to a game distributed in Australia, and its site is where to check what a particular title has been given and what the markings mean. Do not take a rating from a shop listing or from this page; take it from there.
Two practical points. First, if anyone under 18 will be playing, look the classification up before installing — it takes a minute and it is the one piece of information a parent genuinely needs. Second, nothing in this course presents paid randomised items as suitable for young players, and no game should be chosen for a household on the basis that the containers are "just part of the game".
A note on claims
This site mentions no figures for how many players spend, how much they spend, or how a particular game compares with another. Numbers like that circulate widely and are usually either marketing or guesswork. Where this course cannot point to the body or the publisher responsible for a fact, it leaves the fact out.
The example this course uses
Because the category is easier to understand with something specific in front of you, the course refers to one title throughout. That title is World of Tanks, an online multiplayer tank game played on desktop and laptop computers.
Here is what its publisher states about it, and the statement is theirs rather than a finding of ours: World of Tanks is an online multiplayer tank action game with more than 160 million players worldwide; players take part in team battles against other players around the world; the game uses the publisher's Core engine, has destructible objects, 30 maps remade in high definition, and a new soundtrack. The commission arrangement behind this site pays when a reader creates and activates an account. Beyond those statements we do not characterise the game — not its difficulty, not its community, not how it compares with anything else, because we have a commercial interest and are not in a position to judge it for you.
It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. There is no version of it for a phone or a tablet in what the publisher tells us, so if your only device is mobile, this particular example is not available to you, and Step 2 will not apply.
If you want to look at it for yourself at this point, you can visit the World of Tanks website.
Paid affiliate link: if you create and activate an account after following it, this site is paid a commission. The price to you is unchanged, and nothing in this course depends on your following it.
The household, at Step 1
The hypothetical household introduced on the home page — two adults, a fifteen-year-old, one five-year-old Windows desktop, a connection that slows in the evening — has a Step 1 task that costs nothing. They need to agree what, if anything, may be spent. They settle on a figure of zero for the first month, on the grounds that nobody yet knows whether the game will still be in use in four weeks. Because a minor is involved, they also agree to check the classification before installing rather than after.
This household is invented for the course. It has no name, it reports no outcome, and it is not a reader's story. It exists to give each step something concrete to act on.
Words you will meet
- Client
- The program installed on your own computer that connects to the game's servers. Updating "the game" usually means updating the client.
- Server
- The computer, run by the publisher, that the client connects to. Which region's server you use affects how responsive the game feels.
- Account
- The login that owns your progress. It is separate from the client: reinstalling the client loses nothing, losing the account loses everything.
- In-game currency
- Points or credits used inside the game. Some kinds are earned by playing; some are bought with real money. Knowing which is which is most of financial literacy in these games.
- Patch
- An update to the client. Large online games patch often, and patches can be several gigabytes.
Before you move on
You should now be able to say, without looking it up, that free-to-play describes the price of entry and nothing else; that the cost of running the game is met by the minority of players who spend; and that paid content generally arrives as cosmetics, as convenience, as a subscription, or as randomised containers. If the fourth of those is in a game a young person will play, the classification is the thing to check, at the Classification Board rather than at a shop.
Step 2 moves from the arrangement to the machine, and asks whether your computer can actually run one of these games.
Checklist 1 — understanding the arrangement
- Write down, in your own words, one sentence explaining how a game with no entry fee pays for its servers.
- Name the three common shapes of paid content, and add randomised containers as the fourth.
- Decide a figure in Australian dollars that may be spent on games in the next month. Zero is a complete answer.
- List who in the household will be playing, and note whether any of them is under 18.
- If anyone is under 18, look up the game's Australian classification at classification.gov.au before anything is installed.
- Confirm the game you are considering runs on the kind of computer you own, not only on a console or a phone.
- Note, in one line, whether any claim you have read about the game came from its publisher, from a regulator, or from someone who is paid when you sign up.