Step 1 of 5
What “free to play” actually means
A game that costs nothing to install is still a business. This step explains how that business works, so that nothing later in the course comes as a surprise.
Six words you will meet constantly
Every field has its shorthand, and games are worse than most. These six terms appear on nearly every sign-up page you will see, and the rest of this course assumes you know them.
Glossary
- Free to play
- A game you can install and play without paying. Money comes later, from optional purchases inside the game, and the phrase tells you nothing about how much there is to buy.
- Client
- The program that runs on your own computer. Installing a game means installing its client; the game's data lives partly on your machine and partly on the publisher's servers.
- MMO
- Massively multiplayer online. The game runs on servers you connect to, other people are in the world with you, and it needs an internet connection to work at all.
- In-game currency
- Points, coins or credits used inside the game. Some kinds are earned by playing; some kinds are bought with real money. Knowing which is which is the whole of Step 4.
- Microtransaction
- A small optional purchase made inside a game rather than at the point of installation — typically for cosmetic items, convenience, or currency.
- Account
- The record held by the publisher that identifies you. It is usually created with an email address and a password, and it is usually confirmed by email before it works.
Where the money comes from
There are only three common answers, and a given game may use more than one.
The first is up-front payment: you pay once, you own the game, there is nothing further to buy. This is the model most people over forty assume is still standard, and for a sizeable part of the market it is not.
The second is subscription: a recurring monthly fee keeps your account active. This is rarer than it used to be outside a few long-running titles, but it still exists, and it is the model where a cancellation date matters most.
The third is free to play. Installation costs nothing and the publisher earns from a minority of players who choose to buy things inside the game. Those things vary enormously — appearance items that change nothing about how the game plays, items that save time, passes that open up a season's worth of rewards, or currency that converts into any of the above.
None of these three models is dishonest in itself. What matters is knowing which one you are in before you start, because it determines the question you should be asking. Under the first model the question is “is it worth the price?” Under the third it is “what will I be invited to buy, how often, and what happens if I never do?”
A note on fairness
You will hear the phrase “pay to win” used as an accusation about free-to-play games. It describes a design where paying players get an advantage in competition rather than just a different appearance. Whether any particular game does this is a matter of judgement and argument among players, not a fact we can settle for you — and it is exactly the kind of thing worth searching for in players' own discussions before you invest many hours.
Reading a game's own description
A publisher's own page about its game is marketing. That is not a criticism; it is simply what the document is for, and it means you should read it the way you read any advertisement — paying close attention to what is stated and treating everything else as unproven.
Three habits make this easier. The first is to separate statements of fact from statements of feeling. “Runs on Windows and Linux” is a fact you can act on. “Endless possibilities” is not a fact at all, and nothing follows from it.
The second is to notice the absences. If a page tells you what you can build but never mentions what things cost inside the game, that silence is information. It does not mean the game is hiding something; it means you have a question to answer elsewhere, from the store page, the in-game shop, or the publisher's support documentation.
The third is to check the platform line before anything else. A great deal of disappointment in this category comes from people reading three pages of description and discovering at the end that the game does not run on the computer they own. Step 2 is entirely about this, and it is the reason it comes so early.
If you want to practise, read a product page with a pen in your hand and write two lists: one of things you could verify, and one of things you could not. The second list is usually longer, and knowing that is useful by itself.
The example we follow: a vehicle-combat game
Rather than talk about “a game” in the abstract for five steps, the course uses one real title throughout. Crossout is an online multiplayer game, distributed on a free-to-play basis, set in a post-apocalyptic world. Its distinguishing feature is that players build their own vehicles: the shape of the machine, its armour, its armament, its support systems and its decorative accessories are all assembled by the player rather than chosen from a fixed list.
Everything in that paragraph comes from what the vendor publishes about its own game. Where the course needs a detail the vendor does not state — how much a particular item costs, how long a match lasts, how many people are playing — we say that the vendor does not state it, rather than filling the gap.
Two restrictions are worth knowing now, because they affect whether the rest of the course is relevant to you. The game is for desktop computers running Windows or Linux. It is not offered for Mac. If you own a Mac and nothing else, you can still read the course for the general lessons, but this particular example will not install on your machine.
You can look at the vendor's own pages at any point if you want to compare what they say with what we say.
Paid affiliate link. If you create an account after following it, Subtle Plane is paid a commission; your costs are unchanged and the rest of this course works just as well without it.
The household, at Step 1
Worked example — a hypothetical household
Two adults share a four-year-old Windows desktop in a two-bedroom flat. Their fifteen-year-old has asked about a vehicle-building game a friend mentioned at school. Nobody in the household has installed a PC game before.
At Step 1 they do one thing only: they establish that the game costs nothing to install, that money can be spent inside it, and that nobody yet knows how much or on what. They do not install anything. They write the question “what is there to buy?” on the fridge list, where it stays until Step 4 answers it. This household is invented to illustrate the steps; it is not a real family and it reports no results from any product.
What the model gives you and what it costs you
| In its favour | Against it |
|---|---|
| You can try the whole thing before any money changes hands, which removes the usual risk of buying a game you dislike. | The decision to spend arrives later, in smaller pieces, and at moments chosen by the game rather than by you. |
| Online games of this kind usually keep a larger population of players, because the entry cost is nothing. | Progress that money can shorten is progress that time must otherwise fill, and the balance between them is set by the publisher. |
| If you stop playing, you have lost nothing but time. | Anything you bought stays tied to the account and the publisher's servers, not to you. |
Neither column makes the case on its own. The point of setting them side by side is that both are true at once, and a sensible decision takes account of both.
Before you move on
Before you move on
You should now be able to say, in one sentence each, how a game you are looking at makes its money, which of its claims you could check and which you could not, and whether it runs on the kind of computer you own. If the third one is still open, Step 2 settles it in about fifteen minutes.
Checklist for Step 1
Work through this away from the screen
- Write down which of the three payment models the game you are considering uses: up-front, subscription, or free to play.
- Find the game's own platform line and copy it down word for word, including the operating systems named.
- List three things the game's page states as fact, and three things it implies without stating.
- Write down one question the page did not answer, and where you will look for the answer.
- Decide whether this is a game you will play alone or with other people in your household, and note who.
- Check whether anyone under eighteen will be using the account, because that changes Step 3 and Step 4.
- Write the sentence “I have not installed anything yet” and leave it true until you have finished Step 2.
All six checklists, including this one, are gathered in printable form on the All checklists page.