What “free to play” actually means
The first thing to understand about a game that costs nothing to install is not how to install it. It is where the money comes from, because that answer shapes everything else: what the game asks of you, when it asks, and what you are agreeing to when you say yes. This step takes about eighteen minutes to read.
What the phrase promises, exactly
“Free to play” is a description of the price of entry and nothing more. It means you can download the game, create an account and play it without paying at the point of entry. It is the opposite of the older arrangement, where a game was a box or a one-off purchase and the price was the whole transaction.
Read literally, that is a narrow promise, and it is usually kept. The thing people get wrong is not the promise — it is the assumption that a game with no entry price has no commercial relationship with its players at all. It does. The relationship simply starts later, and it is optional.
Being clear about this is not cynicism. A great many free-to-play games are perfectly playable by someone who never spends anything, and millions of people play them on exactly those terms. But you will make better decisions in Step 4, when money comes up, if you have already worked out in Step 1 how the arrangement is meant to function.
Where the money comes from
A game studio has to pay wages, servers and bandwidth. In a free-to-play game, that money arrives from a minority of players who choose to buy things inside the game, and sometimes from advertising or from sponsorship arrangements of the kind this very website runs on. The industry term for the purchases is microtransactions: small payments made inside a running game rather than at a shopfront.
Because only a minority pay, the things on sale have to be attractive enough to be worth real money to someone who is already enjoying the game for nothing. That pressure is the single most useful thing to understand about the whole category. It explains why free-to-play games tend to be built around long-running progression, visible customisation and a steady supply of new items, rather than a fixed story that ends.
It also explains the structure of the sign-up. A game that earns nothing at installation needs you to come back, so it needs a way to recognise you: an account, tied to an email address, which is why Step 3 of this course is about accounts rather than gameplay.
The four things these games usually sell
Across the category, almost everything on sale falls into one of four groups. Knowing the groups means you can categorise any shop screen in about ten seconds.
| What it is | What you are buying | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Cosmetic items | Appearance only: paint, decals, shapes, decorative parts. No effect on how the game plays. | The least risky category, and often the most expensive per item. Entirely optional by definition. |
| Time savers | Faster progress towards something you could also earn by playing. | Work out how many hours of play the purchase replaces before deciding it is good value. |
| Access passes | A season or battle pass: a set of rewards earned over a fixed period, usually by playing a lot. | These have an expiry. That deadline is a sales technique as much as a design; it is fine to let one lapse. |
| Randomised items | A container whose contents are not known until it is opened. | The category that deserves the most caution, especially with younger players. Step 4 covers it properly. |
A fifth thing many games sell is an intermediate currency: you buy tokens with dollars, then spend tokens on items. The practical effect is that the price of an item is no longer in dollars, so comparing it with the price of a coffee takes arithmetic. If you only take one habit from this step, take this one — convert back to Australian dollars before deciding anything.
The words you will keep meeting
The category has its own vocabulary, most of which is less complicated than it sounds.
- Free to play
- A game that can be installed and played without an entry payment. Often written F2P.
- MMO
- Massively multiplayer online. A game where a large number of people play in the same persistent world or matchmaking system at the same time, over the internet.
- Client
- The program you install on your own computer. It talks to the game company's servers; without an internet connection, an online game's client has nothing to talk to.
- Microtransaction
- A small payment made inside the game rather than at purchase time.
- Cosmetic
- An item that changes appearance only and has no effect on how the game plays.
- Progression
- The system that makes new parts, levels or abilities available as you play.
- Matchmaking
- The automatic process that puts you into a match with other players, usually trying to pick people of a similar level.
- Launcher
- A small program that downloads the game, keeps it updated, and starts it. Many games run inside one.
One concrete example of the genre
Within the free-to-play category there are many genres. One of them is vehicle combat, where instead of controlling a person you control a machine you have built, and the construction is as much a part of the game as the fighting.
Crossout is one title of that kind. The vendor describes it as a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game set in post-apocalyptic realities, in which the main role is played by vehicles constructed by the players themselves. The vendor states that the vehicle can be modified in appearance and in its parameters: shape, armour, armament, support systems, and aesthetic accessories. That is the description the vendor supplies, and this site does not extend it — we have not tested the game, we make no claim about how it plays, and where the vendor's description is silent, so is this course.
It is used here for two reasons. First, “build your own vehicle” is a clear illustration of why free-to-play games tend to be built around customisation, which is the point made in the section above. Second, in Step 2 it gives us a real requirements question to work through, because the vendor states that the game is for desktop Windows and Linux computers and that there is no Mac version.
Paid affiliate link: if you create an account with Crossout after following this link, the affiliate network that operates the link pays Raw Segment a commission. The game is free to install, you pay nothing extra, and this step says the same thing whether you follow the link or not.
This course does not walk you through any particular game's menus. Interfaces change every few months, screenshots go out of date, and a walkthrough of one shop screen teaches you nothing about the next one. Everything here is written in terms that apply across the category, so that it still works when the buttons move.
What free to play does not mean
It does not mean advertisement-free. Some titles show advertising, inside the game or around it, and some are promoted through affiliate arrangements like this one.
It does not mean the account is disposable. A game account is a real account with a real password, and if you reuse a password across sites, a problem at one of them becomes a problem at all of them. Step 3 deals with this.
It does not mean no data is collected. Any online game needs to know who you are, who you played with and what you own; the company's own privacy policy, not this site, tells you what else it keeps. Read it once, at sign-up, while you are already paying attention.
It does not mean the game is permanent. Online games are services, and services can change their rules, their prices or their availability, and can close. Nothing you build in an online game is a possession in the way a boxed game on a shelf was.
And it does not mean nothing is required of you. A free-to-play game is designed to be played regularly. Daily rewards, limited-time events and streak bonuses are all ways of asking for your time. Time is the thing most people actually spend in these games, and it is worth naming that before you start rather than after.
How “free” is treated under Australian law
Describing something as free, when it is not free in the way a reasonable person would understand, is capable of being misleading or deceptive conduct. In Australia that is prohibited under the Australian Consumer Law, which is administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The ACCC publishes general guidance on advertising and selling, including how prices and “free” claims should be presented, and on the consumer guarantees that apply to goods and services bought in Australia — including digital ones.
Two practical consequences follow for you as a reader. The first is that you are entitled to expect a game advertised as free to play to be genuinely playable without payment, and if a title turns out to be unplayable without spending, that is worth raising rather than shrugging at. The second is that consumer guarantees do not disappear because a transaction happened inside a game. If you pay money for a digital item and it is faulty or not what was described, you have rights, and the ACCC's site is the place to read about them rather than a forum post.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice; it is a pointer to where the actual rules live. The same applies everywhere in this course: when something is genuinely a matter of Australian law or regulation, we link the body responsible and let you read the current version.
You should now be able to say, in your own words, that a free-to-play game charges nothing at entry and earns its money from optional purchases made later by a minority of players; that those purchases are mostly cosmetics, time savers, passes and randomised containers; and that the main thing the game actually asks of everyone is time. If any of that is still fuzzy, reread the first two sections before going on — Step 2 assumes it.
Checklist 1 — understanding the deal
Work through this at your own pace. Nothing is recorded; the boxes are printed, not clickable, and this site remembers nothing between visits.
- Say out loud, in one sentence, where a free-to-play game's revenue comes from.
- Name the four categories of in-game purchase without looking at the table.
- Decide which of those four categories you would consider buying, if any, and which you would rule out now.
- Write down, in Australian dollars, the most you would spend on one game in a month. Nil is a valid answer and a common one.
- Find the privacy policy and terms of service of any game you are considering, and confirm they exist and are readable before you sign up.
- Check whether the game you are curious about needs a permanent internet connection to play at all.
- Write down how many hours a week you are willing to give it, before you start rather than after.
- Read the ACCC page on consumer guarantees once, so you know what you are entitled to if a paid digital item is faulty.