Step 5 — Spending, classification and household rules

Most games of this type run two parallel currencies, and the difference between them is the whole subject of this step.

An earned currency accumulates by playing. You cannot buy it directly, you cannot usually convert it back, and it exists to pace your progress. Spending it costs you nothing but time already spent.

A purchased currency is bought with real money, usually in bundles whose sizes do not divide neatly into the prices of the things you want. That mismatch is deliberate in many games: buying the 500-unit bundle for a 420-unit item leaves 80 units behind, and that remainder is a quiet argument for the next purchase.

Two habits follow. First, always translate a price back into Australian dollars before deciding — the number shown inside a game is in its own units, and those units are designed to feel small. Second, check whether the thing you want can be earned at all. Games frequently sell a shortcut to something that is also obtainable by playing, and knowing which case you are in changes the decision entirely.

1. Write down the item's price in game units.
2. Write down the smallest bundle of purchased currency that covers it, and what that bundle costs in Australian dollars.
3. Divide: that is the real price of the item, including the remainder you did not want.
4. Ask whether the same item can be earned by playing, and roughly how long that would take.
5. Ask whether the purchase is one-off or recurring. A monthly pass is a subscription whatever the game calls it, and a subscription deserves an annual figure.
6. Sleep on anything above the figure your household agreed in advance. Nothing in a well-run game expires in a way that makes this impossible.

This is dull arithmetic and that is the point. The purchase flows in games are designed to be quick; the arithmetic is the only part that slows them down, and slowing down is the decision you are actually making.

A randomised purchase — sold as a crate, container, case or pack — is one where you pay a fixed amount and the contents are decided by chance. You know the pool of possible items; you do not know which you will receive.

Describing it in those words is the single most useful thing this course can do, because the in-game presentation rarely uses them. Three practical observations, each phrased as general guidance rather than as a claim about any particular title:

• The expected cost of a specific item is not the price of one crate. If you want one particular thing, the amount you may spend before receiving it is open-ended. Treat the money as spent on the chance, not on the item.
• Published odds vary by game and by jurisdiction. Some publishers and some storefronts disclose the probability of each outcome. Where a game discloses them, read them before buying. Where it does not, note that it does not.
• Where items can be traded between players, a crate has a second, speculative dimension. People buy crates hoping to resell the contents. That is a different activity from playing a game, with a different risk attached, and it should be a deliberate choice rather than a drift.

Randomised purchases, and game features that resemble gambling, are a subject of ongoing public policy attention in Australia. We do not state any legal threshold, rating rule or classification outcome here, because those are matters for the bodies that publish them — see the next section. What we will say plainly is that a purchase with a chance-based outcome is not a suitable thing to put in front of a child, and a household with younger players should treat it as something to switch off or supervise rather than to explain away.

If you or someone in your household is finding spending hard to control, that is a health matter rather than a gaming one, and the right people to speak to are a GP or a dedicated support service rather than a website about computer games.

Computer games distributed in Australia are classified under the national classification scheme. The body that publishes those decisions, and the searchable database of them, is the Australian Classification Board.

That site is where you look up the classification given to a specific title and the consumer advice that accompanies it. We deliberately do not print a classification for any game on this page: classifications are decisions made by that body, they can be revisited, and a figure copied onto a third-party site is exactly the kind of thing that goes quietly out of date. Search the title, read the decision, and you have the current answer from the body that made it.

The same site explains what the markings mean. If you have ever wondered what the difference between the categories is in practice, reading that explanation once is a better use of five minutes than any summary we could write.

This course is written for adults, and it is not aimed at anyone under 16. But adults are often the ones setting things up for someone else, so three points belong here.

Check the classification and consumer advice for the specific title on the Classification Board's database before installing it for a younger player, rather than relying on the fact that it costs nothing. Price and suitability are unrelated.

Separate the payment method from the account. A game account on a family computer that has a saved card attached to it is a different proposition from one that requires a parent to type something in. Most platforms allow purchases to be restricted; the relevant controls are in the storefront or the operating system rather than in the game.

For online interaction — chat, voice, strangers — the eSafety Commissioner is Australia's independent online safety regulator and publishes practical guidance for parents and carers, including on reporting. It is the right reference, and we would rather point to it than paraphrase it.

Rules written in advance work. Rules written during an argument do not. The ones below are examples of the first kind.

Pick two of these rather than all five. A short rule that is kept beats a thorough one that is quietly abandoned in a fortnight.

Work through it in order, and keep the evidence as you go.

1. Find the receipt. Purchases made through a storefront generate one; purchases made directly from a publisher usually generate an email.
2. Read the publisher's own refund or purchase policy — the one you located in Step 3 — and follow the route it gives.
3. If the purchase was made through a storefront, that storefront has its own process, which is often the faster path.
4. Keep a dated note of what you asked for and what you were told. A short record settles most disputes without anything further.
5. If you are not getting anywhere, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes on consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law and on what to do when a business will not resolve a problem. Your state or territory consumer affairs office is the other general route.
6. If the problem is that someone obtained money or information from you by deception, Scamwatch accepts reports and publishes information about how those approaches work.

The hypothetical share house is still hypothetical: three adults, no names, no claims about anything they bought or how it turned out.

They do the arithmetic from the second section once, on paper, for the first thing one of them wanted. The bundle mismatch is what surprises them — the item is a smaller number than the smallest bundle that covers it, so the real price is the bundle, not the item. That single calculation does more for them than any rule.

They then pick two agreements rather than five: nothing is bought without saying it out loud first, and no card is saved on the shared computer. They look the title up on the Classification Board's database once, because none of them had ever done that and it took a minute. They do not need a spending figure, because the "say it out loud" rule turns out to be enough for them — which is the honest result, and not necessarily the result another household would get.

You have reached the end of the course. You should be able to explain to someone else where a free game's money comes from, whether a given computer can run it, what the four documents behind a sign-up say, how to judge a first session, and how to price something in game units in Australian dollars.

Nothing here required you to spend anything, and you can stop at any step without having missed something later. If it is useful, take the printable checklists and keep them next to the computer. That is the whole course, and we are not going to invent a sixth step to keep you here.