Step 5 of 5
Living with it: time, money and randomised items
The first four steps get you to a working account and a steady first session. This one is about the months afterwards, which is where a free-to-play game turns out to have a price after all — sometimes in dollars, sometimes in evenings.
Writing the figure down first
Decide your monthly limit in Australian dollars before you open a shop, and write it on the same sheet that holds your five computer specifications. The number matters less than the fact that it exists and was chosen in a calm moment rather than at the end of a losing evening. Zero is a complete answer and a common one; so is ten dollars; so is fifty, if that is genuinely spare.
Two refinements make the figure useful rather than decorative. Give it a review date — the end of the quarter, or a birthday — so it is a decision you revisit rather than a rule you resent. And write down what it covers: whether an annual pass counts against it, whether a gift for someone else counts, whether unspent amounts roll over. Vagueness in the rule is what the rule is supposed to remove.
Premium currency and why dollars go blurry
Most online games do not sell items for dollars. They sell a token currency for dollars, and items for tokens. You buy a bundle of currency, spend part of it, and are left with a remainder that is too small for anything and too large to ignore.
This is not a secret and it is not unique to games — gift cards and casino chips work the same way — but it has a real effect on judgement. A price expressed in a currency you have never used before does not carry the same weight as a price in dollars, and bundle sizes are routinely set so that the remainder nudges you towards one more purchase.
The defence is simple and entirely within your control: before buying any bundle, work out the dollar value of what you actually want, and write it next to the token price. Doing that arithmetic once, in your own hand, restores the comparison the token currency removed. If the item is worth it in dollars, it is worth it; if the sentence "I am paying eighteen dollars for this" sounds wrong, that is information.
The kinds of purchase, and which are which
| Kind | What you get | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Premium currency | Tokens to spend in the game's shop | What is the dollar price of the thing I actually want? |
| Cosmetic item | An appearance change only | Would I pay this in dollars for something only I will mostly see? |
| Convenience purchase | Faster progress towards something reachable by playing | Am I buying time back, or buying out of a part I would enjoy? |
| Pass or subscription | A bundle of benefits for a set period | Does it create an obligation to play in order to get value from it? |
| Randomised item | A fixed price for an unknown result | Am I comfortable paying a known amount for an unknown outcome? |
A household rule is far easier to write against these five categories than against "spending". "No randomised purchases; cosmetics up to twenty dollars a month; passes discussed first" is a rule a person can actually follow.
Randomised items, in plain terms
A randomised item is a purchase where the price is fixed and the result is not. You pay a known amount and receive something drawn from a pool of possible outcomes, with the valuable ones rarer than the common ones. They appear under many names: crates, cases, boxes, packs, capsules, containers.
Three features are worth naming without drama. The outcome is determined by the company's own rules, and whether the odds are published varies between titles and between jurisdictions — if the game publishes them, read them; if it does not, note that you are paying for an unknown you cannot evaluate. The reward schedule is uneven by design, which is a pattern that holds attention well beyond the point where the maths is favourable to the buyer. And the token currency discussed above means the real cost of a run of attempts is harder to tally than it would be in dollars.
None of that makes buying one wrong. It makes it a decision that deserves the same deliberate treatment as any other purchase of an uncertain thing: decide the amount beforehand, in dollars, and treat it as spent whatever comes out.
Games containing paid randomised items are treated distinctly under Australia's classification arrangements, and the classification and consumer advice attached to a specific title are published in the national database maintained by the Australian Classification Board at classification.gov.au. That database, not a page like this one, is the current answer for any particular game, and it is free to search. This workbook does not state a rating, an age threshold or a legal requirement without pointing you at the body that sets it.
A line this workbook holds
Nothing here presents games with purchasable randomised items, or features that simulate gambling, as suitable for children or young people. Where a household includes young people, the classification entry, the parental controls found in Step 3 and the payment-side controls below are all worth settling before an account is used rather than after.
Where young people are involved
Three practical layers, in order of reliability. The outermost is the payment method: a card that is not stored in the account, or a prepaid arrangement with a fixed balance, is a limit that cannot be argued with. The middle layer is the operating system or storefront's family controls, which can require approval for purchases. The innermost is the game's own parental settings, which are the easiest to change and therefore the weakest of the three.
The part that is not a setting matters more. Agreeing in advance what is allowed, and agreeing that saying "I spent more than I meant to" will be met calmly, prevents the situation where a problem is hidden until it is large. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance written for parents and carers on games, spending and online safety at esafety.gov.au, and it is a better source for that conversation than this page.
Controls that sit outside the game
Controls inside a game can be changed by whoever is logged in. Controls outside it generally cannot, which makes them the ones worth setting up.
Do not store a payment method in the account if you can avoid it; the small friction of entering it each time is the point. Check whether your bank or card provider offers spending limits, merchant category blocks or instant notifications, because a message on your phone the moment a charge is made is the fastest feedback available. Consider a separate low-balance card or a prepaid arrangement for this hobby, which turns a limit into an arithmetic fact.
Keep the receipts. Storefronts and game companies email them, and a folder of them makes the monthly tally a two-minute job instead of a guess. If something goes wrong with a purchase, those receipts are also what any complaint will be built on. Your rights as a consumer in Australia, including the consumer guarantees that apply to digital products and services, are set out by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission at accc.gov.au, and a business's own terms cannot remove them.
If you are checking what a particular title's shop contains, the vendor publishes that, and it changes. Visit the World of Tanks website to read the current arrangements from the source rather than from a summary.Paid affiliate link. The publisher is paid a commission if you create and activate an account after following it. No commission is paid on anything you spend inside a game, and nothing in this step is written to encourage spending.
The other currency: time
Online games are designed to be returned to. Daily objectives, limited-time events, passes that expire and progress that resets on a weekly cycle all exist to convert interest into habit. Knowing that is not cynicism; it is the same thing as knowing a supermarket puts the staples at the back.
Two habits make the difference. Decide the session length before starting, and set an actual alarm rather than relying on the feeling that it has been about an hour, because that feeling is unreliable inside a game by design. And notice when a session is being driven by an expiring event rather than by wanting to play; "I am only on because the pass resets tomorrow" is a sentence worth hearing yourself say.
Evening sessions deserve a separate note. Bright screens and competitive play late at night make sleep harder, and tiredness is the commonest reason a hobby stops being enjoyable. A fixed stopping time is a kinder rule than a maximum duration, because it does not need to be recalculated every night.
Finally, missing an event costs nothing real. Limited-time content returns, in some form, in nearly every online game. The feeling that something is being permanently lost is manufactured, and recognising it as manufactured is enough to defuse most of it.
Keeping updates manageable
Online games update often, sometimes weekly, and updates can be large. Three arrangements keep that from becoming an irritation. Schedule them: most clients can be set to update automatically or can simply be opened an hour before you intend to play. Watch the data allowance, because a monthly cap that was comfortable before the game may be tight after a few large patches. And keep a margin of free disk space, because an update usually needs room for both the old and the new files while it works.
A related habit from Step 4 is worth repeating: when something breaks after an update, the vendor's repair or verify function is almost always the correct first response, and reinstalling is almost always unnecessary.
Pausing, leaving and closing the account
A hobby you can leave is a hobby you can enjoy. Three different exits are available and they are not the same.
Stopping is just stopping. Nothing is lost; online game accounts typically sit untouched for years, though the terms you read in Step 3 will say whether a company reclaims inactive accounts and after how long.
Uninstalling returns the disk space and leaves the account intact, as Step 4 described. It is the usual choice for "not at the moment".
Closing the account is a request made to the company, through the process its privacy notice sets out. That notice is also where you will find whether closure deletes the associated information or only disables access, and how long any retained records are kept. If you make such a request in Australia and cannot get an answer, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains your privacy rights and its complaints process at oaic.gov.au.
A worked example, concluding the hypothetical household
At the end of the first month the adult from the overview reads back the sheet. The figure written in Step 1 was "$0 per month, reviewed at Christmas". It has held, because nothing was ever stored as a payment method. They have played three evenings a week, with an alarm at ten o'clock, and once stayed on an extra hour because a weekly reset was close — which they notice, write down, and decide is the thing to watch.
The laptop, moved to the dining table, no longer slows after twenty minutes. Updates run on Saturday mornings alongside the household's other downloads. They have not bought a randomised item, have not decided never to, and have written "$20 maximum, in dollars, decided before opening the shop" against that line for the quarterly review. The workbook is finished; nothing was spent, and nothing is owed to anyone.
Before you close the workbook
You now have a written monthly figure with a review date, a way of converting token prices back into dollars, a clear idea of what a randomised item is and what it is not, controls set outside the game rather than inside it, a stopping time, an update routine and three different ways to leave. All five checklists are gathered on the All checklists page, which prints on A4 without the navigation.
Step 5 checklist
- Write a monthly limit in Australian dollars, with a review date, before opening any shop.
- Write down what the limit covers: passes, gifts, whether unspent amounts roll over.
- Before buying a currency bundle, work out the dollar price of the thing you actually want.
- Sort what the shop sells into the five kinds, and decide a rule for each kind rather than one rule for all.
- If you consider a randomised item, set the dollar amount first and treat it as spent whatever the result.
- Look up the title's classification and consumer advice in the national database before any young person plays.
- Avoid storing a payment method in the account.
- Set spending limits or notifications with your bank or card provider, outside the game.
- Keep purchase receipts in one folder and tally them monthly.
- Decide a session length and a stopping time, and set a real alarm.
- Notice sessions driven by an expiring event rather than by wanting to play, and write them down.
- Schedule updates for a convenient time and keep a margin of free disk space.
- Check your remaining monthly data allowance after the first few large patches.
- Know the three exits: stopping, uninstalling and closing the account, and where the account closure process is described.