A five-step course for Australians who have never downloaded a PC game before
The whole course is about fifty minutes of reading if you go straight through, and each step stands on its own if you would rather do one a night. Every step ends in a checklist you can work through at your own desk, with nothing to sign up for and nothing to remember your answers.
How this page is paid for
Idle Facet is published by F-Global s.r.o. and earns money from paid affiliate links. One game, World of Warships, is used in this course as the worked case, and the links to it are affiliate links: if you follow one and create an account, the publisher is paid a commission by the affiliate network that operates the link. You are charged nothing extra, nothing on this site requires you to click one, and you can finish all five steps and both checklists without ever leaving Idle Facet. The full explanation is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
00 The five steps
- Step 1 — What you are actually signing up for: the difference between buying a game, downloading a client and holding an account.
- Step 2 — Working out whether your computer can run it: finding your own specifications and comparing them to a published requirements list.
- Step 3 — Reading the terms, the privacy notice and the classification: the four things worth finding before you create an account.
- Step 4 — Downloading, installing and the first login: getting the file from the right place and knowing what a normal install asks for.
- Step 5 — In-game spending, randomised items and keeping the account: how money works after the install, and how accounts are lost.
01 Who this course is for, and who it is not for
This course is written for an adult in Australia who has used a computer for years for ordinary things — email, banking, streaming, photographs — and has now decided to try a game that is downloaded and installed rather than opened in a browser. Perhaps a relative plays one and you would like to join in. Either way, you have probably found that most explanations are written by people who already know what a client, a launcher and a game account are, and who do not stop to say so.
So this course stops to say so. Terms are explained the first time they appear, and nothing later in the course assumes you read a forum post or watched a video first. You do not need to know what a graphics card is before Step 2; by the end of Step 2 you will know how to find out which one you have.
It is not for you if you already play PC games and want a buyer's guide: there are no scores here, no rankings and no claim that one game is better than another. Nor is it a support service — if a game will not start on your machine, the vendor's own support channel is the place for that, and Step 4 explains how to find it.
02 Before anything else: the five-minute check
Most of the trouble beginners run into is decided before any download starts. Three things, checked once, prevent nearly all of it: which operating system your computer runs, how much free storage you have, and which email address and new password the account will use. Everything in Step 2 and Step 4 builds on those three answers.
If you want to do the check now rather than read first, it is the opening checklist on the All checklists page, printed on its own so you can carry it to the computer in question.
03 What the course costs, and what you can do without spending
The course costs nothing to read and there is nothing to join. There is no account here, no email list, no certificate at the end and no record kept of how far you got — the checklists do not remember which boxes you ticked, by design, because that would mean storing something about you.
Whether a particular game costs money is a separate question, and it is the vendor's to answer rather than ours. Step 1 explains the shapes that question takes, and Step 5 covers what to do before the first optional purchase is offered to you. Where this course mentions a specific game it states only what that game's vendor has published, and says plainly when the vendor has not published something.
04 A worked example running through the course
To keep the steps concrete, the same hypothetical household appears in each one. It is an invented example written to illustrate the steps, not a real household and not anyone's reported experience: two adults in a unit in Adelaide, one desktop computer about four years old that is used for everything, and a laptop that belongs to the workplace of one of them and therefore cannot have anything installed on it.
That second detail matters, and it is why the example exists. A work-managed laptop is the single most common reason a beginner's install fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the game. You will see the household hit that in Step 2, work around it in Step 4, and make a decision about shared spending in Step 5.
05 Where World of Warships appears in this course, and why
A course about downloading a PC game is easier to follow if one real game is used throughout, so that "find the requirements page" means something you can actually go and look at. The game used here is World of Warships, a naval game for desktop computers. It is used because the publisher of this site has a commercial relationship with the affiliate programme that promotes it, and that is the honest reason — it was not chosen by comparison, and no comparison is offered.
What the programme states is narrow, and this course does not go beyond it: the game is downloaded and installed on a desktop computer, an account is created and then activated, and Windows and Mac desktop computers are supported while Linux is not. Anything else — including what it costs — is for the vendor's own pages to tell you, and where the vendor does not state something, this course says so instead of filling the gap.
The link below is a paid affiliate link: if you create an account after following it, this site is paid a commission, at no additional cost to you.
Visit the World of Warships website
06 Official Australian sources used in this course
Where a step needs a fact about rules, safety or consumer rights in Australia, it links to the body responsible rather than restating it. These are the ones the course uses:
- Australian Classification Board — the body that classifies films, computer games and certain publications for sale and distribution in Australia.
- Australian Cyber Security Centre — the Australian Government's lead agency for cyber security advice to the public.
- Scamwatch — the ACCC's service for information about scams and for reporting them.
- eSafety Commissioner — the national independent regulator for online safety.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — the regulator for privacy and freedom of information at Commonwealth level.
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission — the regulator for competition and consumer law, including the Australian Consumer Law.
07 How this course is written and kept current
It is written by the editorial team at F-Global s.r.o. There is no named author, because no single person's opinion is being offered — the steps are a sequence, and the sequence is the content. Each step relies on two sorts of source: the vendor's own published pages, and the Australian government bodies listed above. Where neither covers a point, the step says so and phrases it as general guidance.
The course is reviewed twice a year, and after any change we notice in the vendor's published terms or in the Australian material it links to. The date of the last review appears in the footer of every page. The About page sets out the method in more detail, including the commercial relationship behind the game used as the example, and the Contact page is where corrections are sent.
08 Short answers to common questions
Do I have to do the steps in order?
No, but Step 2 and Step 4 are easier if you have read Step 1, because Step 1 is where the vocabulary is defined. Step 5 can be read at any time and is worth reading before you spend anything.
Will anything be installed on my computer by reading this?
No. Idle Facet is a set of ordinary web pages. Nothing is downloaded, nothing runs in the background, and the site sets no cookies and loads nothing from any other server, as set out in the Cookie Policy.
Can I use these checklists for a different game?
Yes. The checklists ask you to find things that any desktop game vendor is likely to publish — requirements, terms, privacy notice, support contact — rather than things specific to one title.
Does the course work on a Mac?
The steps apply to both Windows and Mac desktop computers, and Step 2 tells you where to find your system details on each. The game used as the example is stated by its programme to be for Windows and Mac desktop computers only, so if you use Linux, that particular example will not apply to you.