Step 1 of 5

What "free-to-play" actually means

A game that costs nothing to install is still a business. This step explains where the money comes from instead, and gives you the handful of words you need for the rest of the course.

The model in one paragraph

A free-to-play game is one you can install and play without paying, where the publisher expects to earn money from a minority of players who choose to spend afterwards. The game is not a sample or a trial version with a locked door at the end. It is the whole product, run as an ongoing service, paid for by optional purchases made inside it.

That arrangement is neither generous nor sinister. It is a distribution decision, and it has consequences you can predict once you know to look for them. A game funded this way needs a large population of players to find the few who will spend, so it is designed to be easy to start and to keep you coming back. Those two design pressures explain most of what will feel unfamiliar about your first week.

The words you will keep meeting

Game writing is full of shorthand, and nobody stops to define it. Here is the small vocabulary this course uses. Each term is defined once, here, and then used normally.

Four things the publisher can sell you

Almost everything on sale inside a free-to-play game falls into one of four groups. Learning to sort what you see into these groups takes about a minute per game and tells you more than a review will.

Appearance. Paint, decals, shapes, sounds — items that change nothing about how the game plays. A game that sells only appearance items is making a clear statement about where it wants its revenue to come from.

Time. Items that make progression faster: boosters, experience multipliers, a monthly pass that increases what you earn per session. You could reach the same place by playing longer. This is the most common model, and the most worth understanding, because the price of the item is implicitly a price on your hours.

Access. Content that is otherwise closed off: an extra storage slot, an additional character or vehicle slot, a region. Whether this matters depends entirely on how restrictive the free version is.

Capability. Equipment that performs better than what a non-paying player can get, or can get quickly. Games vary enormously here, and the difference between "better" and "available sooner" is often deliberately blurred. Step 4 comes back to this, along with items whose contents are randomised.

Why your time is part of the deal

In a game you buy once, the publisher has already been paid when you start playing. In a free-to-play game, the publisher is paid only if you are still playing in a month. Everything follows from that.

It means daily rewards, weekly events, login streaks and seasonal passes — structures that reward you for returning on a schedule rather than for playing well. None of that is dishonest; it is simply the business model made visible. But it does mean the game is designed to occupy a recurring slot in your week, and it is worth deciding in advance how large that slot is allowed to be, rather than letting the game propose an answer.

It also means the experience is not fixed. An online game changes: balance is adjusted, items are added, modes are retired. The game you read about a year ago is not the game you will install today, which is why this course avoids describing any specific title's content in detail and teaches you to check the vendor's current material instead.

Reading a game's own description

Publishers describe their own games in a particular register, and once you can read it you will extract real information quickly. Take a description of the kind a publisher writes:

What the description does not tell you is also worth noting. It says nothing about how long progression takes, how large the player population is in Australian time zones, or what any individual item costs. Those are the questions to take to the vendor's own site. Where a vendor does not state something, the honest answer is that it is unstated — not that it is good or bad.

Visit the Crossout website Paid affiliate link. Quiet Concept's publisher earns a commission if you create and confirm an account after following it. The link does not change what this page says, and the price to you is the same.

What "free" does not promise

Three things get assumed and should not be.

First, free does not mean no account. Nearly every online game requires one, usually with a confirmed email address, and that account is a durable record held by the publisher. Step 3 covers what you are actually agreeing to there.

Second, free does not mean no cost at all. Your computer's electricity, your internet data, and any storage the client occupies are real, if small. On a metered or mobile connection, a multi-gigabyte client download is worth planning for.

Third, free does not mean unrestricted. Publishers routinely limit which operating systems and which countries they support, and those limits are set by the publisher, not by you. A game may support desktop Windows and Linux but not macOS, for instance — Crossout's vendor states exactly that. Step 2 is about finding out where you stand before you spend an evening on a download that will not run.

Under the Australian Consumer Law, administered by the ACCC, businesses selling to consumers in Australia must not engage in misleading or deceptive conduct, and consumer guarantees can apply to digital products and services. That is a general statement of the law rather than advice about any particular purchase; the ACCC's own site is the place to read the detail.