In-game spending, randomised items and keeping the account

5.1 Why money comes last in this course

In the third payment shape described in Step 1 — an account created without an up-front payment, with optional purchases inside — the money question does not arrive at the start. It arrives after you have played for a while, invested some hours, and formed an attachment. That is a harder moment at which to think clearly than the moment before you installed anything, and it is not an accident of design.

So the useful thing to do is to decide now, in the quiet, what your answer will be: a figure per month you are content to spend, or nothing at all. Both are entirely respectable answers. A decision made in advance is easier to keep than one made in the moment, and writing it on the same sheet of paper you have been using makes it real.

5.2 The forms in-game spending takes

Broadly, four, and they are worth naming because they feel different from one another.

• Appearance items. Things that change how something looks and nothing else. The cost is only money.
• Convenience purchases. Things that save time — faster progress, more storage for your things. The cost is money, and they put a price on the patience of people who do not pay.
• Content. Additional parts of the game sold separately. The nearest thing to an ordinary purchase.
• Randomised items. A purchase where you pay a known amount for an unknown result drawn from a set of possibilities. Treated separately below.

Many games also use an intermediate currency: you buy a quantity of tokens with money, then spend tokens inside the game. This matters more than it looks, because it separates the moment of paying from the moment of spending, and because the quantities sold rarely divide neatly into the prices charged. If you decide on a monthly figure, measure it in Australian dollars leaving your account, not in tokens.

5.3 Randomised items, and why they are treated separately

A randomised item purchase is one where the money is certain and the outcome is not. These have attracted sustained attention from regulators, parliaments and classification bodies in several countries, and the arrangements around them continue to change, which is exactly why this page does not state a rule, a rating or an age threshold of its own.

What this course says instead is where to look. Computer games distributed in Australia are classified under the national scheme administered by the Australian Classification Board, whose site publishes both the current classification decisions and the explanations of what the classifications and consumer advice mean. If you want to know how a particular title is treated today, that database is the source, and it will be current in a way that no article can be.

Two things can be said plainly and without a source, because they are statements of ordinary care rather than of law. Purchases whose outcome is random are not suitable for children, and should not be presented to them as a feature of a game they are allowed to play unsupervised. And an adult who chooses to make such purchases should set a figure beforehand, because that is the only part of the transaction they control. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for parents and carers about gaming, and the ACCC publishes material on consumer rights that applies to digital purchases.

5.4 Setting your position before you are asked

There are three positions a beginner can sensibly take, and the point of the table below is that each has a real cost. None of them is the correct answer, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Whichever you pick, write it down with today's date. Revisiting the note in three months is more informative than any amount of thinking about it now.

5.5 Payment hygiene on a shared computer

If a card is stored in the account, anyone who can reach the account while it is signed in can spend from it, usually without re-entering anything. On a household computer that includes people who were not party to your decision.

Three ordinary measures reduce that to near nothing: do not store the card at all and enter it when needed; where the platform offers a purchase password or PIN, turn it on; and check the bank statement rather than the in-game history, because the statement is the record that counts and it is the one that shows totals. If a charge appears that you did not make, the vendor's support channel and your bank are both appropriate first calls, and the ACCC's Scamwatch pages explain how to report when something looks like a scam rather than an error.

5.6 How accounts are actually lost

Almost never by a dramatic technical attack on your computer. The ordinary routes are these: the password was reused somewhere else that was breached; someone was persuaded to type their details into a page that looked like the vendor's but was not; the login was shared with a friend, which usually breaches the terms you read in Step 3 and removes your standing to complain; or the email address attached to the account was abandoned, so the recovery path no longer leads anywhere you can reach.

Each has a dull preventive. A password used in one place only. The habit of typing the vendor's address yourself instead of following a link in a message. Never sharing the login, however trusted the friend. And keeping the email address on the account one you still use and still control. General advice along these lines, written for individuals rather than for specialists, is published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre at cyber.gov.au.

5.7 Recovery: what to keep, and where

Recovery is a thing you arrange before you need it. Keep four items: the email address the account was created with, the date it was created, the two-factor recovery codes, and the receipt or reference number for any purchase. Keep them somewhere that is not the computer the game is on — a notebook in a drawer is perfectly adequate and cannot be reached over the internet.

The reason is practical. When an account cannot be opened, the vendor's support will ask you to demonstrate that it is yours, and the things they can check are exactly those: the original address, the approximate date, and a payment reference. People who can produce them are helped quickly. People who cannot are often not helped at all, and there is no higher authority to appeal to.

5.8 Leaving well: uninstalling and closing an account

Removing the game and closing the account are two separate actions, in the same way that installing and registering were. Uninstalling frees the disk space and leaves the account exactly where it was; the account will still exist, still hold whatever you paid for, and still be attached to your email address.

If you want the account closed as well, the request goes to the vendor, through the support contact you noted in Step 3. What happens to personal information afterwards is governed by the vendor's privacy notice and, in Australia, by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, which the OAIC publishes and explains. You can ask a company what it holds about you, and the OAIC's site sets out how that request works and what to do if it is refused.

5.9 The household in the example

5.10 Before you move on

You have reached the end of the course. What you have is a sheet of paper with five hardware numbers, four answers from the vendor's documents, a spending position with a date against it, and a drawer with recovery codes in it. Nothing on that list required expertise, and all of it transfers to the next game, the next vendor and the next computer.

The All checklists page gathers every checklist from the five steps in one place, formatted to print on a single run, so you can work through them away from the screen.

5.11 Step 5 checklist

This is the one worth revisiting every few months rather than ticking once.