Bare Canvas

Step 1 of 5

What “free to play” actually means

The phrase is everywhere and it is not a lie, but it is doing a lot of work in very few words. This step takes it apart so that the rest of the course has something solid to stand on.

The words you will keep meeting

Before anything else, here are the terms that get used without explanation in almost every description of an online PC game. You do not need to memorise them. You need to stop being slowed down by them.

A short glossary

Client
The program that runs on your own computer. The game you install is the client; the publisher's servers are the other half. When someone says “the client crashed”, they mean the program on their machine stopped.
Launcher
A small separate program that sits in front of the game. It signs you in, checks whether your copy is up to date, downloads anything missing and then starts the game. Most online PC games use one.
Patch, or update
A download that changes the game after you have installed it. Online games patch often, sometimes weekly. Patches can be large, which matters if your internet plan has a data allowance.
Free to play
A business model, not a promise about the whole product. The download and the basic game cost nothing; the publisher expects to earn money from some players later through optional purchases.
Microtransaction
A small optional purchase inside the game. Individually they are usually a few dollars. The model works on the fact that they are small enough not to feel like a decision.
Premium currency
An in-game currency you buy with real money, usually in bundles, and then spend inside the game. The bundle sizes rarely divide neatly into the item prices, which is worth noticing.
Account activation
The step after you fill in a sign-up form where you prove the email address is yours, usually by clicking a link in a confirming email. Until you do it, the account is not finished.
Grinding
Repeating ordinary play to earn in-game progress that could otherwise be bought. Whether that is a pleasant routine or a chore is personal, and it is one of the main things to work out about any game before you invest time in it.

Where the money comes from instead

A game that costs nothing to install still costs money to make and to run. Servers run continuously. Staff are paid. If no one is paying at the door, the money arrives from somewhere else, and knowing where changes how you read everything the game shows you.

In the free-to-play model, the large majority of players never pay anything, and a small minority pay a great deal. That is not a criticism of the model; it is simply its arithmetic. It does explain a design pattern you will notice straight away, though: a free-to-play game spends real effort on making you comfortable and then, at intervals, shows you something you could have sooner if you paid.

This has a practical consequence for a beginner. The parts of the game that feel like gentle encouragement — a progress bar nearly full, a timer counting down to when something becomes available, an offer appearing at the moment you are enjoying yourself — are deliberate. Recognising them as design rather than as coincidence removes most of their pull. You can still choose to pay. You just do it as a decision rather than as a reflex.

The alternative models are worth naming so you can tell them apart. A paid game charges once, up front, and is yours. A subscription game charges monthly for continued access. A free-to-play game charges nothing and sells optional extras. Some games mix these. The sign-up flow that this course uses as its example — create an account, download the client, activate the account — is the typical free-to-play shape.

The four things that usually cost money

Across this category, optional purchases nearly always fall into four groups. Different games emphasise different ones, and some games sell only from one or two groups.

1. Cosmetic items

Things that change how something looks and nothing else: a different colour scheme, a decorative flag, a name plate. These have no effect on how the game plays. They are the least consequential kind of purchase and often the most expensive, because people will pay for them.

2. Time

A payment that makes ordinary progress happen faster — double the progress for a period, or an instant completion of something that would otherwise take hours of play. You could have reached the same place without paying; you would have spent longer.

3. Content

Additional parts of the game that are not available otherwise: a new area, an additional item, an extra piece of equipment. Whether this group exists, and whether anything in it affects competitive balance, is one of the sharpest differences between games in this category.

4. Randomised items

A purchase where you pay a known amount and receive an unknown item from a pool. These go by many names. They are the group that attracts the most attention from regulators and parents, and Step 5 deals with them properly rather than in passing.

A note on where our example sits

World of Warships is the product behind the paid links on this site. The vendor's description of the arrangement we take part in covers creating and activating an account and installing the client on a desktop computer running Windows or macOS. Beyond that, we do not restate what the product contains or what it charges for, because the vendor has not stated it to us, and we would rather say nothing than guess. If you want those details, read them at the source: visit the World of Warships website.

What “free” has to mean in Australia

Advertising a product as free in Australia is not unregulated. The Australian Consumer Law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct in trade or commerce, and it is enforced against the business doing the advertising, not against the reader. The ACCC is the body that administers that law and publishes guidance on how it applies to advertising and to online purchases.

What that means in practice for you is modest but real. If a game is advertised as free, the part described as free must actually be free, without a hidden condition that the advertising does not disclose. It does not mean every part of the game must be free, and it does not mean the publisher cannot sell you things later. So the useful question is never “is it really free?” It is “which parts are free, and what is being sold?”

The same body of law gives you consumer guarantees that cannot be signed away by a terms-of-service document. We come back to that in Step 3, because it is the single most useful thing to know before you agree to a publisher's terms.

The household example

Our hypothetical household, at Step 1

The two adults in our invented flat read a game's front page together. It says the game is free to play. One of them takes that to mean the whole thing is free forever; the other assumes there must be a catch and is suspicious of the lot.

Both are half right. After working through this step they land somewhere more useful: the download and the basic game cost nothing, there is a shop inside the game, and the question worth asking before installing anything is which of the four groups above that shop sells from. They write that question on a piece of paper and move on to Step 2. No claim is made here about what they found, because they are an illustration, not a report.

What this step is not telling you to do

It is not telling you that free-to-play games are a trap. Plenty of people play them for years, spend nothing, and enjoy themselves. It is not telling you that paying is a mistake either; paying a few dollars for something you will use for months is an ordinary transaction.

It is also not telling you to hurry. Nothing in this course expires, there is no sequence you are falling behind in, and no game you are missing out on by reading slowly. The only thing this step asks is that you know what model you are looking at before you install anything.

Before you move on

  • “Free to play” describes how a game is paid for, not what it contains.
  • The client runs on your computer; the launcher signs you in and keeps the client current.
  • Optional purchases nearly always fall into cosmetics, time, content or randomised items.
  • In Australia, advertising a product as free is subject to the Australian Consumer Law, enforced by the ACCC.
  • You can play a free-to-play game without ever paying, and most people do.

Checklist for Step 1

  • Write down, in your own words, what “free to play” means. One sentence is enough.
  • Find the game's own front page and read how it describes its own pricing.
  • Identify which of the four purchase groups that game appears to sell from.
  • Check whether the game has a shop you can look at before installing anything.
  • Decide now, in advance, what you are willing to spend in the first month. Writing “nothing” is a complete answer.
  • Note down any term you met that you still cannot define, and look it up before Step 2.
  • Confirm the computer you have in mind runs Windows or macOS, since Linux is outside this course.