Publisher file · Course SM-FTP-5

About Soft Margin

Soft Margin publishes one thing: a five-step course for readers in Australia who are new to free-to-play PC games. This page says who publishes it, how it is put together, and what money is involved — including the part that is in our interest rather than yours.

What this site is, and what it is not

It is a workbook. Five steps, in a fixed order, each ending in a checklist you can print and carry to the machine. It is written for an adult who has not done this before and would like to understand the decisions before making them.

It is not a news site, not a review site and not a personal blog. There are no bylines, because nobody's opinion is on sale here; the material is a sequence of checks. There are no scores, no awards and no test results, because we do not test games and would have to invent them. There are no accounts from readers, because we collect none. And it is not an official source for any game: Soft Margin has no connection with any publisher beyond the paid links described below.

Editorial method

How the course was structured

The five steps follow the order in which the questions actually arrive for somebody doing this for the first time: what the words mean, whether the machine can run it, who owns the account, what it costs and who decides, and then what the first week is like. Each step was written to stand on its own vocabulary, so that a reader can stop after any step with something complete rather than something half-finished. The checklist at the end of each step was written first, and the prose was written to explain it.

What sources each step relies on

• S-01 — general description of the free-to-play model, plus the publisher's own statements about the example title. No third-party commentary.
• S-02 — the diagnostic tools built into Windows and Linux, and the general advice on software updates published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
• S-03 — ACSC guidance on passphrases and account security; Scamwatch on the shape of scam messages; the OAIC for the Australian Privacy Principles as a frame for reading a publisher's policy.
• S-04 — the Australian Classification Board for classification and consumer advice; the ACCC for consumer guarantees; the eSafety Commissioner for gaming and family settings.
• S-05 — eSafety for reporting online harms, Scamwatch for scams, and general practice for settings and troubleshooting, phrased as guidance rather than as fact about any particular title.

Where an Australian body is responsible for a question, we link to it rather than paraphrasing the detail, because the detail changes and a copy of it here would quietly go stale. Where a publisher is the only source of a fact about its own product, we use the publisher's words and say so. Where neither exists, we leave the question open — "the vendor does not state this" is an answer we are willing to print.

How often it is reviewed

The whole course is read through at least twice a year, and sooner if a reader writes to point out something wrong. The review date appears in the footer of every page and in the specification table at the top of each step. A review checks three things: that every outward link still goes where it did, that nothing we attribute to a publisher has changed, and that nothing has crept in that reads as a recommendation rather than a check.

Authorship

Everything here is written by the Drastavela Room s.r.o. editorial team. There are no individual authors, no contributor biographies and no staff photographs, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an omission: a course of checks does not need a personality attached to it, and inventing one would be the first step towards inventing other things.

The commercial relationship, stated plainly

Yes — the product named most often in this course is one we have a commercial relationship with. Soft Margin is paid a commission by an affiliate network when a reader creates an account and confirms their email address after following one of our links to Crossout. That is the site's only source of revenue.

What that arrangement buys is the mention: Crossout is the example title because the arrangement exists, and we would rather write that sentence than let you work it out. What it does not buy is the content. No advertiser sees a step before it is published, nobody outside the editorial team can ask for a sentence to be changed, and the checklists would be identical if the arrangement ended tomorrow. The full explanation, including what does decide the content, is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.

How the site is built

Plain HTML and one stylesheet, served as files. There are no cookies, no analytics, no advertising tags, no embedded video, no web fonts and no third-party code of any kind, which means your browser contacts no server but ours while you read. The only script on the site is a few lines of our own that open the small-screen menu and send the checklists page to your printer; you can read it at /static/app.js.

The consequence worth stating is that we do not know who reads this. There is no audience measurement and no record of your visit beyond the ordinary access log our hosting provider keeps for security and fault diagnosis, described in the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, write to info@softmargin.online and say what and where. Corrections of fact are made without argument, and the review date is updated when they are. We cannot help with a game account, a payment or a technical fault in somebody else's product — those go to the publisher concerned — but an error in our own text is ours to fix.