About this site

Subtle Plane publishes one thing: a five-step course for adults in Australia who are new to desktop PC games. This page explains who publishes it, how it was written, and who pays for it.

The publisher

Subtle Plane is published by EnergoAlliance s.r.o., a company registered in the Czech Republic.

There is no editorial staff list on this site, because there is no newsroom. The course is written and maintained by the EnergoAlliance s.r.o. editorial team, and that is the only authorship any page here claims. We do not publish bylines, photographs or job titles, and nothing on this site is presented as a report, an investigation or a personal account.

How the course was structured

The five steps were planned as a sequence before any of them was written. The ordering rule was simple: nothing in a later step may assume knowledge that an earlier step never introduced. That is why the platform question sits in Step 2 rather than Step 4, and why money and classification come after the account rather than before it.

Each step was then written to a fixed shape — an explanation, a worked illustration using the same hypothetical household throughout, and a checklist that can be completed away from the screen. The checklists are the point of the course. The prose exists to make them intelligible.

The household that appears in every step is invented. It is not a reader, a customer or an interview subject, it has no name, and it is never shown reporting an outcome from any product. It exists so that general advice has a concrete setting.

What each step relies on

Statements about Australian rules and institutions point to the body responsible, rather than to us:

• Classification of computer games — the Australian Classification Board, which publishes ratings and the consumer advice attached to each decision.
• Consumer guarantees on digital purchases — the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
• Passwords, account security and safe software practices — the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
• Scams and how to report them — Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre.
• Online safety for families and individuals — the eSafety Commissioner.
• Privacy rights over personal information — the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Statements about a specific game come only from what that game's vendor publishes about itself. Where a detail is not published — item prices, server locations, match lengths, player numbers — we write that the vendor does not state it rather than estimating. We do not run tests, we do not publish benchmarks or scores, and we do not reprint requirement figures, because those change and a stale copy would be worse than a link.

Where a general claim could be neither sourced nor sensibly verified, it is phrased as guidance or left out. There are no statistics on this site for that reason.

How often it is reviewed

The whole course is reviewed twice a year, and the review date appears in the footer of every page. Between reviews, a page is corrected as soon as we learn that something in it has become wrong — a changed URL for a government body, a platform that is no longer supported, a procedure that no longer matches current Windows. Corrections of substance update the review date.

If you find something inaccurate, write to us. Corrections are the most useful mail we get.

The commercial relationship, stated plainly

This is the part most sites bury, so it is in the open here. Crossout, the game used as the running example throughout the course, is a product with which the publisher has a commercial relationship: links to its website on this site are paid affiliate links, and EnergoAlliance s.r.o. is paid a commission by the affiliate network that operates the link when a reader creates and confirms an account through one.

That arrangement is how the site is funded, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What it does not do is decide what the course says. The checklists were written before any link was placed, the steps contain criticism of the free-to-play model as well as description of it, and every step is designed to be fully usable by someone who never follows a link at all. We have no arrangement with any other company mentioned here, and none of the Australian government bodies listed above has any connection with this site.

The full explanation, including where the links appear and what does determine the content, is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.

What this site is not

It is not an official site for any game, publisher or platform, and it is not authorised, endorsed or sponsored by any of them. It is not a news publication. It is not accredited training: there is nothing to sign up for, no certificate, no account and nothing to pass. It is not technical support, legal advice or health advice. And it collects nothing about you — there is no form anywhere on this site, and no cookie, as the Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy set out in detail.