A five-step course on starting your first free-to-play desktop game
This course is written for readers in Australia who have heard that a game costs nothing to start, and who want to know what that sentence actually covers before they type an email address into anything.
Each of the five steps takes about eight to twelve minutes to read, so the whole course is roughly an hour if you read it straight through. You do not have to: the steps are numbered, each one ends in a checklist you can work through on your own, and nothing is lost if you come back a week later.
How this course is paid for
Blank Cipher is published by GALLARDO TRADE s.r.o. and carries paid affiliate links. When a reader opens one of those links and goes on to create an account and confirm their email address with the game publisher, we are paid a commission by the affiliate network that operates the link. The reader pays nothing for the link and nothing extra afterwards. The commission is settled after the fact and has no bearing on what the steps say, which checks we tell you to run, or whether a step suggests walking away. Affiliate links are marked with a line of text next to them every single time, and never appear inside a checklist. You can read all five steps, print every checklist and finish the course without opening a single one. The whole arrangement is set out on our funding page.
The five steps, in order
- Step 1 — What free-to-play actually means on a desktop PC
Where the money comes from in a game with no purchase price, and which words on a store page tell you which model you are looking at. - Step 2 — Working out what your computer and connection can handle
How to read your own machine's specifications, find the ones a game asks for, and recognise when the answer is simply no. - Step 3 — Reading the account, privacy and purchase terms
The four documents behind a sign-up form, what to search them for, and what an email confirmation step is doing. - Step 4 — Setting up a first session and checking it works
A plain order of operations for the first hour, including the settings worth changing before you play rather than after. - Step 5 — Spending, classification and household rules
In-game currencies, randomised item purchases, Australian classification information, and agreements worth making in a shared house.
Who this course is for, and who it is not for
It is for an adult who can use a computer for ordinary things — email, a browser, buying something online — and who has never installed a game that asks you to create an account first. It assumes nothing about hardware knowledge. Terms are defined the first time they appear and then used plainly.
It is also useful if you are the person in the house who gets asked to approve things. Step 5 exists largely for that reader: it deals with currencies, randomised purchases and classification information rather than with playing.
It is not for you if you already build your own machines, read specification sheets for fun, or want tactics, builds and patch notes. None of that is here, and the course does not pretend otherwise. It is also not a support service: we cannot see your computer, your account or your network, and we never ask you to tell us anything about them.
The one checklist to do before anything else
If you read nothing else today, read this. These four things take about ten minutes together and they are the ones that are awkward to fix later.
- Find out which operating system you are running. On Windows, open Settings and look at System, then About. On a Linux desktop, the equivalent is usually under Settings, About, or the command
lsb_release -ain a terminal. Write the answer down, including whether it is 64-bit. - Decide which email address you will use. One you can reach today, because most game accounts send a confirmation message you have to open before the account works.
- Check how much free space the drive has. Game downloads are commonly tens of gigabytes, and a drive with nothing left on it causes failures that look like something else entirely.
- Agree the money rule before you install. Either "nothing is bought in this game", or a figure in Australian dollars per month that you have decided on calmly. Step 5 explains why this one is first rather than last.
What you will be able to do when each step is done
| Step | You will be able to | Read |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Say out loud where a free game's revenue comes from, and spot the model from the words used on its own pages | 10 min |
| 2 | Read your machine's specifications and compare them against what a game asks for, without guessing | 11 min |
| 3 | Find and skim the four documents behind a sign-up form, and know which clauses matter to you | 12 min |
| 4 | Run a first session in a sensible order and tell a hardware problem from a connection problem | 11 min |
| 5 | Explain in-game currency and randomised purchases to someone else, and look up classification information | 11 min |
What you can do for nothing
Every check in this course is free. Reading your own system information is free. Reading a publisher's terms, privacy policy and refund policy is free. Looking up a title in the national classification database is free. Working out what your connection does is free.
Games described by their publishers as free-to-play are free to install and free to play in the sense the publisher states, and no further. Step 1 is mostly about the gap between those two sentences, because that gap is where readers get surprised.
A worked example: one hypothetical household
The household in this example is invented to illustrate the steps. It is not a real family, has no name, and reports no results about any product. We use it because an abstract instruction is harder to follow than the same instruction applied to someone.
Picture a share house of three adults in a suburb with an ordinary fixed broadband connection. One desktop computer, bought about four years ago, runs Windows. One of the three uses a MacBook for work and nothing else. The money conversation has happened once, loudly, about a different subscription, so there is some appetite for agreeing things in advance.
Through the five steps, that household works out that only one of the two computers is a candidate at all, that the desktop's graphics card is the number to check rather than its age, that the sign-up asks for an email address they can reach, that the first session should be judged on a quiet evening rather than at eight o'clock on a Saturday, and that "no purchases without saying so out loud" is easier to keep than a dollar figure. Each step picks the example up again where it left it.
Where Crossout appears in the course, and why
Crossout is the title we use as the concrete example when a step needs one. According to its publisher it is a free-to-play MMO vehicle-combat game set in post-apocalyptic realities, built around vehicles that players construct and modify themselves — shape, armour, armament, support systems and cosmetic accessories. The publisher's offer we link to covers desktop Windows and Linux; macOS is not included, which is why the example household's MacBook drops out in Step 2.
It appears for two honest reasons. First, it fits the category this course teaches: an account-based, free-to-play desktop game, which is exactly the shape of thing the five steps are about. Second, we have a commercial relationship with the affiliate network that operates its link, and we are telling you that rather than leaving you to guess. Everything the course states about Crossout comes from what the vendor itself states; where the vendor does not state something, we say so instead of filling the gap.
Paid link. If you open it and go on to create an account and confirm your email address, we are paid a commission by the affiliate network. Your costs do not change, and nothing in this course changes either.
Australian bodies the steps point you to
Where a step touches something a public body in Australia publishes on, we link to that body rather than restating it. These are the five that come up:
- Australian Classification Board — the national body that classifies films, computer games and some publications, with a searchable database of decisions.
- Scamwatch — run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, it publishes information about scams and takes reports.
- eSafety Commissioner — Australia's independent regulator for online safety, with guidance for adults and for families.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — the national privacy regulator, which publishes the Australian Privacy Principles and handles privacy complaints.
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission — the national competition and consumer regulator, which publishes on consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law.
Step 4 also refers to the Australian Cyber Security Centre, which publishes general advice on keeping devices and accounts up to date.
How the course is written and kept current
It is written by the GALLARDO TRADE s.r.o. editorial team. There are no named authors, no instructors and no learner accounts, because none of those would be true. Nothing is collected from you: there is no sign-up, no newsletter, no progress saving and no form of any kind on this site.
The steps are reviewed on a set cycle and whenever something they rely on visibly changes — a vendor restating what its offer covers, or a public body reorganising the page we point to. The review date is printed in the footer of every page. The method behind the structure, and the full statement about our commercial relationships, are on the About page.
When you are ready, Step 1 starts here, or you can take the printable checklists on their own.