Step 5 of 5

Spending money, or not, and settling into a routine

The first four steps were one-off tasks. This one is about the months after, when the decisions are smaller, more frequent, and made while you are enjoying yourself — which is exactly when a decision made in advance is worth having.

Where the money actually goes

Step 1 listed the common ways a game that costs nothing to download earns money. Inside one, they stop being categories and start being buttons.

A cosmetic purchase changes appearance and nothing else. A progression purchase saves time — the same thing you could reach by playing, reached faster. A content purchase adds something you otherwise could not have at all. A subscription applies a continuing benefit for as long as it is paid. And a randomised purchase gives you a container whose contents are decided by chance.

These differ in one respect that matters more than taste: how clearly you know what you are getting for the money. The first four tell you before you pay. The fifth does not.

Currencies and the two-step price

Most games in this category put an in-game currency between your money and the thing you are buying. You buy a quantity of currency with Australian dollars, and then you spend that currency inside the game.

Two things follow. The currency is usually sold in bundles that do not divide neatly into item prices, so a purchase leaves a remainder — a balance too small to spend, which makes the next purchase feel smaller than it is. And a price shown in currency is not a price shown in dollars.

The habit that fixes both: before buying anything, divide what the bundle cost in AUD by how many items it will actually buy, and write that number down. It is usually larger than it felt. Check also how the currency is paid for — a saved card turns a purchase into one click, and removing it is the simplest way to make the decision take three.

Randomised items

Where money buys a container whose contents are decided by chance, the amount you spend and the thing you receive are not fixed to each other. You may get what you wanted on the first attempt or not at all, and the money is gone either way.

Some publishers disclose the probabilities; some disclose them only in certain markets; some do not. If a game you play sells randomised items, look for whether the odds are published and where. A game that publishes them is telling you something a game that does not is not.

In Australia, the classification system is the official record of what a game contains and what advice is attached to it. The Australian Classification Board publishes both the classification and the consumer advice for classified titles, and its website explains what the classifications and the advice lines mean. That is the authoritative source; this course does not state any title's rating or make any claim about what the law requires of a particular game, and neither should anyone else without pointing you at the record.

Nothing here presents paid randomised items as suitable for children. If a household includes people under 18, the sensible arrangement is that purchases are not possible without an adult — which means no saved payment method on the account the younger person uses, and the platform's own parental controls switched on. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families on those controls.

Refunds and Australian Consumer Law

Digital products sold to consumers in Australia come with the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law, and those guarantees cannot be removed by a clause in a publisher's terms. The ACCC publishes guidance on what the guarantees cover, including for digital products and online purchases, and on what to do when a business will not help.

Two distinctions are useful. A guarantee is about the product being what it was said to be and working as it should; it is not a right to change your mind. Separately, publishers and platforms operate their own refund policies — often a short window and a limited amount of play time. Read the publisher's policy, and know it sits on top of your legal rights rather than replacing them.

If something was misrepresented to you, that is the misleading-conduct part of the same law, and it is the ACCC's area. Keep receipts and confirmation emails; they are the evidence in any conversation of this kind.

Setting a limit that holds

In Step 1 you wrote down a figure for three months, which may have been zero. Here is how to make it hold, in general terms that apply to any game of this kind.

Make the limit a quantity of money, not a feeling. "I will spend up to this much by the end of February" can be checked; "I will not overdo it" cannot. Write the figure where you will see it — in the same note that holds your Step 3 passages.

Remove the saved payment method so that each purchase is a deliberate act. Keep the receipts in one folder so the running total is visible without effort, because the running total is the thing that disappears when purchases are small and separated by weeks. And agree the figure out loud with anyone else who uses the account, including about who may spend it.

If the limit stops holding — if you find yourself moving it, or not wanting to add up the receipts — that is worth taking seriously rather than rationalising. Free, confidential gambling and financial counselling services exist in every Australian state and territory, and the relevant government and community services can be found through the health and consumer portals of your own state. This course is not qualified to advise on that, and does not try.

A timeline for the first three months

• Week one. Play at the settings you set in Step 4. Change nothing you paid for, because nothing has been paid for. Note what you like and what irritates you.
• Week two. Revisit the graphics settings now that you know what busy moments look like. If the machine struggled, this is when a memory upgrade is worth pricing — it is usually the cheapest useful change.
• Week four. First review. Are you still playing? If yes, this is the earliest sensible moment to consider spending anything, because you now know whether you like it. If no, nothing has been lost.
• Week six. Check the account security you set in Step 4 is still intact, and that the recovery codes are still where you put them.
• Week eight. Add up any receipts. Compare against the figure you wrote in Step 1.
• Week twelve. Full review. Decide whether to continue, pause or stop, and set the next three-month figure deliberately rather than by default.

Keeping the account yours

Three things cause most lost accounts in this category, and none is sophisticated. The first is a reused password exposed in some unrelated breach; the fix was in Step 4 and remains the same.

The second is a message that appears to come from the publisher, asking you to sign in to resolve something urgent. Publishers do send mail; the ones worth trusting do not need you to follow a link in it. Type the address yourself and check from there. Scamwatch collects reports of these.

The third is account sharing or buying. Nearly every publisher's terms in this category prohibit it, and the consequence is that a bought account can be closed without recourse and a shared one can be taken. The passage you noted in Step 3 is where yours says so.

Stopping, pausing and uninstalling

Pausing costs nothing. Uninstall the client from the usual place — "Apps" in Windows settings, or the application folder on a Mac — and the account stays on the publisher's side for as long as the publisher keeps it. Reinstalling later gets it back.

Stopping properly is different. The deletion route, if there is one, is set out in the privacy notice you read in Step 3. Deletion is generally permanent and generally includes anything paid for. Remove the saved payment method first, and cancel any subscription separately — uninstalling software does not cancel a subscription, and that catches people out.

The household we follow

By week four, our hypothetical household has decided they like it enough to continue. They had written down a figure in Step 1; they now spend part of it on a non-random content purchase, work out the dollar cost before buying rather than after, and file the receipt. They remove the saved card afterwards, which takes a minute.

At week eight the receipts add to less than the figure. At week twelve one of them has stopped playing and the other has not, so they set a smaller figure for the next three months. Neither has bought a randomised container, having decided at Step 3 that they would rather know what they were getting — a preference, not a rule, written down when it was easy to write.

The example product

The product this course names as its worked example is an online game published for Windows and Mac desktops. The network that promotes it describes the commercial path as a single opt-in, a download, and creating and activating an account. What it sells inside the game, at what prices, in what currency, and under what refund policy are not things this publisher has been told, and so they are not things this page states. The vendor's own site is where those answers are.

Visit the World of Warships websitePaid affiliate link. If you follow it and go on to create and activate an account, this site is paid a commission by the network that operates the link, at no additional cost to you. It did not affect anything written above. Full disclosure.