Part S-01 · Course file SM-FTP-5

Step 1 — What free-to-play means on a PC

Step 1 of 5

The word "free" is doing a lot of work in the phrase "free-to-play", and most of the confusion that follows comes from not pulling it apart at the start. This step gives you the vocabulary, explains where the money actually comes from, and names the three things such a game asks of you in place of a purchase price.

The words you will meet

Every field has a handful of words that everyone inside it uses without explanation. Here are the ones you will meet in the next four steps, defined once, in the order they usually turn up. You do not have to memorise them; you can come back to this list at any point.

Client

The program that lives on your computer and does the work of showing you the game. An online game is usually split between a client on your machine and servers run by the publisher, which is why you can download a game and still be unable to play it when the servers are down.

Launcher

A smaller program whose job is to check for updates, download them, and then start the client. Some games have their own launcher; others sit inside a shop's launcher. You will usually meet the launcher before you meet the game.

Account

A record held by the publisher that identifies you across sessions and devices. It is what your progress, your settings and any purchases are attached to. It is normally identified by an email address.

MMO

Short for "massively multiplayer online". It means a game whose ordinary state is many people connected to the same servers at the same time, rather than a game you play alone against the computer.

Free-to-play

A business model, not a promise about the whole experience. The client and the account cost nothing; the publisher's revenue comes from optional purchases made later, from advertising, or from both.

Cosmetic

An item that changes how something looks without changing how it performs. Paint, decals and shapes are typical. The word matters because "cosmetic only" is a common claim and a specific one.

In-game currency

A token the publisher invents, bought with real money or earned by playing, and spent inside the game. It puts a layer between your Australian dollars and the thing you are buying, which is worth noticing.

Patch

An update to the client. Patches fix faults, change the balance of the game, and add content. They arrive on the publisher's schedule, not yours, and they consume data each time.

What "free to play" does and does not promise

When a publisher says a game is free to play, the claim has a narrow and fairly reliable meaning: you can download the client and create an account without paying, and you can play without paying. That is a real statement and publishers are held to it. Under the Australian Consumer Law, a business that advertises something as free and then makes it impossible to use without paying is engaging in conduct the ACCC takes an interest in.

What the claim does not promise is that money will never come up. In almost every free-to-play game, it comes up inside the game, repeatedly, by design. Nor does it promise that the free version is the whole of the game, that progress will feel the same with and without spending, or that an item you acquire will still exist in the same form after the next patch.

The honest way to hold the phrase in your head is this: free to start, free to continue, and arranged throughout so that spending is easy and visible. Whether that arrangement is reasonable is a judgement you can only make after you have seen the specific game, which is why this course puts the spending step fourth rather than first.

Where the money in a free game comes from

A free-to-play game has servers, staff, bandwidth and a development team, all of which cost money every month. That money has to arrive from somewhere, and in this category it generally arrives through one or more of four routes.

The first is cosmetic sales: paint, shapes, decals and similar items that change appearance only. The second is convenience: items or passes that save time, such as faster progress or extra storage. The third is content: additional parts, areas or modes sold separately from the free base. The fourth is randomised purchases, where you pay for a chance at an item rather than for the item itself; Step 4 deals with those on their own, because in Australia they raise specific questions about who should be allowed to buy them.

There is also a route that does not involve you paying at all: advertising and referral arrangements, which is how this website is funded. A publisher pays a network, the network pays sites like this one for registrations, and the reader pays nothing. It is worth understanding that route because it explains why so much of the writing you will find about free games is written by people with an interest in you installing one. Including, transparently, us.

Knowing which route a particular game uses tells you most of what you need to know about how it will feel. A game funded by cosmetics tends to leave the rules alone and sell you appearance. A game funded by convenience tends to make the free path slower on purpose. Neither is dishonest; they are simply different arrangements, and the publisher's own store page will usually show you which one you are looking at within a minute of reading it.

The three things a free game asks of you

Disk space and data

A modern game client is large, and the download is only the beginning. Patches arrive regularly and each one is a fresh download. If your internet plan has a data allowance, or if you are on a mobile connection, this is the cost that catches people out, and it is denominated in gigabytes rather than dollars. Step 2 shows you how to check both the space and the connection before you commit.

An account and an email address

You cannot play an online game anonymously, because the servers need to know which saved progress is yours. That means an email address, a password, and a record held by the publisher under its own privacy policy. This is not sinister, but it is a decision: which address, with what password, and read under which policy. Step 3 is entirely about getting that decision right the first time.

Time, and the habit of returning

Free-to-play games are built to be returned to. Daily tasks, seasonal events and progress that accumulates over weeks are all deliberate features, not accidents. There is nothing wrong with a game that rewards regular play, but it is the ask that people notice last and feel most. Step 5 covers setting your own terms around it.

The example title used in this course

Because an abstract description of a category is hard to hold on to, the course uses one concrete title throughout: Crossout. Its publisher describes it as a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game set in post-apocalyptic realities, in which the central role is played by vehicles that the players construct themselves. The publisher's description emphasises modification — the shape of the machine, its armour, its armament, its support systems, and a range of accessories that change appearance.

Two practical facts follow from the publisher's own material. The first is that it is a desktop title for Windows and Linux; macOS is not supported. The second is that getting into it involves creating an account and confirming your email address before you sign in for the first time, which is the ordinary pattern for this category and the subject of Step 3.

Anything beyond those statements — how it plays, how demanding it is on an older computer, whether the free path is comfortable — is not something we can tell you, because the publisher does not state it and we do not test games. Where you want that kind of judgement, the place to find it is the game's own community and the publisher's own store page, read with the same scepticism you would apply to any seller.

Visit the Crossout website Paid link — Soft Margin is paid a commission if you create an account and confirm your email address after following it. You can finish all five steps without following it. How this works.

Before you move on

You should now be able to say, without looking back at the page, what a client is and what it is not, and why an online game needs an account at all. You should be able to describe in one sentence how a free game pays for itself, and you should have a rough sense of which of the four funding routes a particular game uses once you have read its store page.

You should also be comfortable with the idea that "free" is accurate and incomplete at the same time. The next step moves from vocabulary to your own equipment, and it is the step that most often ends the exercise early — which is a good outcome, because it ends it before anybody has downloaded forty gigabytes.