A five-step course on starting your first free-to-play PC game
This course is for an adult in Australia who has heard that a lot of personal computer games cost nothing to install and wants to understand what that involves before clicking anything. Reading all five steps takes about ninety minutes, and most people spread it over a week.
Each step ends in a checklist you can work through at the keyboard. You can stop after any step, and finish the whole thing without spending a cent.
Raw Segment carries paid affiliate links. If you create an account with Crossout after following one of our links to its website, the affiliate network that operates the link pays us a commission. You are never charged anything extra, and the game remains free to install either way. Commission does not decide what this course says, which steps exist, or which products are named in them. The full explanation is on our Affiliate Disclosure page.
The five steps
- Step 1 — What “free to play” actually means: where the money comes from when the download costs nothing.
- Step 2 — Working out whether your computer can run it: finding your own specifications and comparing them honestly.
- Step 3 — Accounts, email and the confirmation step: setting up a sign-in you will not regret.
- Step 4 — Classification, in-game purchases and randomised items: what to check before anyone in the house spends money.
- Step 5 — Your first sessions: settings, other players, time, and knowing how to stop.
Who this course is for, and who it is not for
It is for someone who has never installed a game on a personal computer, or who last did it long enough ago that the process has changed underneath them. It assumes you can use a web browser and nothing beyond that, and every term is explained the first time it appears. It is also for the person in a household who ends up being asked the questions: the parent who wants to know what a randomised in-game item is before saying yes.
It is not for people who already build gaming computers or want tactics for a particular title. It is not professional advice, and not accredited training — no certificate, no sign-up, no record of who read what.
The one checklist to do before anything else
If you do only one part of this course, do this one. Ten minutes, and it prevents most of what the later steps deal with.
- Write down which operating system your computer runs, and whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit. Step 2 shows you where to find this.
- Decide now, in dollars, the most you are willing to spend on any game in a month. Write the figure down. It is allowed to be nil.
- Decide which email address you will use for game accounts, and make sure it is not the one your bank uses.
- Check how much free space is on the drive the game would install to.
- If anyone under eighteen will use the account, read Step 4 before Step 1.
Every item above comes back later with its explanation. The steps are written to be read in order, but each one stands on its own.
What you will be able to do after each step
Explain the business model in one sentence
You will be able to say where the money comes from in a game that costs nothing to install, and name what such games sell.
Read a requirements list without guessing
You will be able to find your processor, memory, graphics and free storage, and compare them with a published list.
Set up an account you can still trust next year
A separate address for game mail, a passphrase used nowhere else, and a way to tell a real confirmation email from an imitation.
Check a classification and set a spending limit
How to look a title up in the national classification record, and how to decide in advance what, if anything, gets bought.
Run a first session on your own terms
Which settings to open first, what to do about other players, and how to stop cleanly — including removing the game.
Keep the whole thing on paper
The checklists page gathers all six lists in one document that prints cleanly on white paper.
A worked example: one household, five steps
This household is a hypothetical example written to show the order of the work. It is not a real family, it is not a reader account, and it makes no claim about how any game performed.
A household has one desktop computer in the living room, bought about four years ago, and two adults who share it. One of them has seen a vehicle-combat game described online and wants to try it. On a Saturday morning they open the system information panel and write down the processor, the amount of memory and the graphics hardware — fifteen minutes, Step 2.
They find the published requirements on the vendor's own site, see that the computer sits between the minimum and recommended figures, and accept that they will turn the detail settings down. They create a free email address used only for games, Step 3, and agree a limit of zero dollars for the first month, Step 4. In the first session, Step 5, they turn voice chat off before joining anything and play for forty minutes.
Nothing in that sequence required a purchase or a hurried decision. That is the point of the order.
What you can do without spending anything
All of it. Reading the course is free, the checklists are free, the specifications you need in Step 2 are already on your machine, and looking up a classification record costs nothing. Creating an account for a free-to-play game costs nothing by definition, which is what the phrase means and the limit of what it promises.
Where money appears at all, it appears inside games, after you are already playing, and always as a choice. Step 4 exists so that choice is made deliberately rather than mid-match. If your answer to every spending question is no, the course still works end to end.
Where Crossout appears in this course, and why
A course about a category needs one concrete example, or it stays abstract. The example used here is Crossout, a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game set in post-apocalyptic realities, built around vehicles that players construct themselves; the vendor states they can be modified in shape, armour, armament, support systems and aesthetic accessories. That is the vendor's description and this site does not add to it.
It appears in Step 1 as an illustration of the genre and in Step 2 as an example of reading a requirements list, since the vendor states it runs on desktop Windows and Linux and not on Mac. It is not a recommendation and has not been tested here.
Paid affiliate link: if you create an account with Crossout through the link below, Raw Segment is paid a commission by the affiliate network that operates the link. You pay nothing extra, and nothing about the course changes if you do not use it.
We are not the game's publisher, its reseller or an official source for it, and we cannot answer questions about anyone's game account.
Official Australian help
Where this course touches classification, scams, privacy or consumer rights, it points at the Australian body responsible rather than inventing a rule. Each is described only as what it is.
- Australian Classification Board — the body that classifies films, computer games and certain publications in Australia, and publishes the national classification record.
- Scamwatch — the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's service for information about scams and for reporting them.
- Australian Cyber Security Centre — the Australian Government's source of cyber security advice for individuals and organisations.
- eSafety Commissioner — the national regulator for online safety, with material on gaming and on reporting online abuse.
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission — the national competition and consumer regulator, which administers the Australian Consumer Law.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — the regulator for privacy and freedom of information at the federal level.
How this course is written and kept current
It is written by the editorial team at Full Life studio s.r.o. There are no individual bylines, because no person's authority is offered here as a reason to believe anything; where a claim matters it is linked to the body responsible or written as guidance you can check yourself. Statements about Crossout come from the vendor's description and nowhere else, and where that description is silent, the course says so.
The whole course is reviewed at least every six months, and the review date appears in the footer of every page. The method is set out in full on the About page, including the commercial relationship behind the links.
Short questions, short answers
Do I have to pay anything to work through this course?
No. Every step can be completed by reading, checking your own computer and visiting public websites. Nothing on Raw Segment asks for money, an email address or an account.
Is this course run by a game publisher?
No. Raw Segment is published by Full Life studio s.r.o. It is not an official source for any game, and no game publisher has reviewed, endorsed or sponsored it.
How long does the whole course take?
Reading all five steps takes roughly ninety minutes. Doing the checklists as well usually takes an afternoon, and you can leave gaps of days or weeks between steps.
Why does the course mention a specific game?
Abstract advice is hard to apply, so Step 1 and Step 2 use Crossout as one concrete illustration of the free-to-play vehicle-combat genre. Links to it are paid affiliate links, and the course is written so that it still works if you ignore them.