Step 1 of 5
Step 1 — What free-to-play actually means on a desktop PC
A game with no purchase price still has to pay for its servers, its staff and its updates. Knowing where that money comes from tells you most of what you need to know before you install anything.
The sentence that needs unpacking
"Free-to-play" is a business model, not a description of the whole experience. It means the publisher does not charge an entry price for the base game. Everything else — whether there is anything to buy later, whether the account is permanent, what the game needs from your computer — is a separate question that the phrase does not answer.
That is not a criticism of the model. Plenty of long-running games work this way, and for a reader who is unsure whether they will enjoy a genre at all, paying nothing to find out is a sensible arrangement. The difficulty is that the words "free" and "no cost" do a lot of work in advertising and very little work in a terms document, and a new player tends to read the advertising first.
So the job of this step is narrow. By the end of it you should be able to look at any free desktop game and say, in one sentence, how it expects to make money from you — and then decide whether that arrangement suits you, before you have an account, a download and an evening invested in it.
Four ways a free game earns
Most free desktop games use one of four approaches, often two of them together. Reading a store page or a publisher's own site with these four in mind makes the page much easier to interpret.
Cosmetic sales
The game sells items that change how something looks without changing what it does: paint, decals, shapes, sound effects. A player who buys none of it is not at a disadvantage in play, only in appearance. This is the model that generates the least friction, and it is the one publishers mention most readily in their own marketing.
Convenience and time
The game is playable in full without paying, but paying speeds things up: faster progress, more storage space, extra slots, a second character, a skipped waiting period. Nothing is locked away permanently; what you are buying is hours. Whether that is good value depends entirely on how much spare time you have, which is a personal calculation rather than a feature comparison.
Content purchases
Part of the game is behind a purchase: a campaign, a region, a vehicle class, a character. Here the free portion is best understood as a long, genuine trial rather than the whole product. There is nothing wrong with that provided you know which part you are standing in.
Randomised items
The game sells a container, crate or pack whose contents are not known in advance and are decided by chance. You pay a fixed amount and receive a variable result. Step 5 deals with this one at length, because it is the model that most deserves a decision made in advance rather than in the moment, and because it is the one with the most public guidance attached to it in Australia.
A fifth arrangement exists — advertising shown inside the game — but it is far more common on phones than on desktop, and you are unlikely to meet it in the kind of game this course is about.
The words that tell you which model you are looking at
You do not need insider knowledge to work out the model. The publisher's own pages almost always say it, in a predictable vocabulary. What follows is a reading guide, not a scoring system.
| If the page says | Read it as |
|---|---|
| "Cosmetic only", "purely visual", "does not affect gameplay" | Cosmetic sales. Worth confirming in the store section once you are in the game. |
| "Premium account", "boost", "accelerate", "battle pass", "season pass" | Convenience and time. Expect a recurring element rather than a single purchase. |
| "Starter pack", "founder's edition", "deluxe edition" | Content purchases alongside the free base game. |
| "Crate", "container", "case", "pack", "chance to receive" | Randomised items. Read Step 5 before buying one. |
| "In-game purchases", "optional purchases" with no detail | Not yet answered. Find the store or shop page on the publisher's site and look there. |
Two practical habits help here. The first is to read the publisher's own site rather than a third-party summary, because the publisher is the party actually bound by what it says. The second is to search the page for the word "purchase" — a browser's find function is faster and more honest than scrolling, and the sentences around that word are usually the ones you were looking for.
About the example title in this course
Where a step needs a concrete example, this course uses Crossout. Its publisher describes it as a free-to-play MMO vehicle-combat game set in post-apocalyptic realities, in which players construct and modify their own vehicles — shape, armour, armament, support systems and cosmetic accessories. That is the extent of what we state about it, because that is the extent of what the vendor states. Anything further — the specifics of its store, what any individual item costs, or how its progression is paced — is not something we assert here. You would read that on the publisher's own pages, which is exactly the habit this section is recommending.
Paid link. We receive a commission if you create an account and confirm your email address after using it. It costs you nothing, and this step would say the same things if the link were not here.
What "free" does not promise
Four things are routinely assumed by new players and are not implied by a game being free to start.
It does not promise that your computer can run it. Free to download is not the same as able to run. Free games still publish hardware requirements, and those requirements still apply. That is Step 2, and it is the step most likely to end the exercise early — which is a result, not a failure.
It does not promise an account-free experience. Nearly every online game of this type requires an account and the confirmation of an email address before you can play. The publisher of the example title we link to states exactly that: registration, confirmation of the email address, and then logging in. Step 3 deals with what that account involves.
It does not promise that the game will exist indefinitely. Online services close. Terms documents are usually explicit that a service can be discontinued, and that in-game items are a licence to use something inside the service rather than property you own outright. Knowing this in advance changes how you feel about a purchase, which is the point of reading before rather than after.
It does not promise it will be free on your device. An offer can be limited to particular operating systems. The offer behind the link in this course covers desktop Windows and Linux and does not include macOS. If the only computer in the house is a Mac, that is the answer, and no amount of further reading changes it.
Words you will meet in the rest of the course
- Client
- The program that runs on your own computer. For an online game, the client talks to the publisher's servers; both have to be working for you to play.
- Launcher
- A small program that signs you in, keeps the client updated and then starts it. Several games install one as part of the main installation.
- MMO
- Massively multiplayer online: a game where many players share the same persistent world or service rather than playing against the computer alone.
- In-game currency
- Points, coins or credits used inside the game. Some kinds are earned by playing, some are bought with real money, and some games have both. Step 5 explains how to tell them apart.
- Account
- The record the publisher keeps of you, usually tied to an email address, which holds your progress and anything you have acquired.
- Patch
- An update to the game, downloaded automatically in most cases. Patches change behaviour and occasionally change hardware requirements.
The example household at Step 1
Our hypothetical share house of three adults — invented to illustrate the steps, with no names and no claims about any product — starts here with a conversation rather than a download.
One of them has found a game that costs nothing to start. The other two have different first questions: one asks "what's the catch", the other asks "will it work on the desktop". Step 1 answers the first and parks the second.
Working through this step, they look at the publisher's own site rather than a video, search it for the word "purchase", and establish that the game is free to start and has things available to buy. They write down one sentence: "free to play, sells things inside, we have not yet checked what kind." That sentence is enough to carry into Step 2. They have installed nothing and created no account, which at this stage is correct.
Before you move on
You should now be able to name which of the four earning models a given game uses, and point at the words on the publisher's page that told you. You should also be clear that nothing in the phrase "free to play" says anything about your hardware, your account or how long the service will exist.
If you cannot find a clear statement about purchases on the publisher's own site, that is itself worth noting. It does not mean something is wrong; it means you have not yet found the page, and Step 3 shows you where the relevant documents usually live.
Checklist 1 — Understanding the model
Print boxes are for pen and paper. This page remembers nothing.
- I have found the publisher's own site for the game, not a third-party page about it.
- I have searched that site for the word "purchase" and read the sentences around it.
- I can name which of the four models the game uses: cosmetic, convenience, content, randomised — or more than one.
- I have checked whether the words "crate", "container", "case" or "chance" appear anywhere, and noted it if they do.
- I have written one sentence describing how this game expects to earn money.
- I know whether the game requires an account and an email confirmation before play.
- I have noted which operating systems the offer covers, and whether mine is one of them.
- I have not installed anything or created an account yet.