Step 3 of 5

Step 3 — Reading the account, classification and spending terms

Creating an account is agreeing to a contract, and the contract is published before you agree to it. This step shows you which four documents to find, which paragraphs inside them actually matter, and how Australian classification and consumer law sit alongside whatever the publisher has written.

The four documents to find

Almost every publisher of a large online game publishes the same four documents, usually linked in small type at the bottom of its website. Finding all four takes a couple of minutes, and reading the parts that matter takes perhaps twenty.

Terms of service, sometimes called the end-user licence agreement or user agreement. This is the contract governing the account.
Privacy notice, describing what the publisher collects about you and what it does with it.
Store, purchase or billing terms, covering anything bought inside the game and how refunds are handled.
Rules of conduct or community guidelines, describing behaviour that can get an account restricted.

If a site has only one of these, that is itself worth noticing. If you cannot find them at all before being asked for an email address, that is worth noticing more.

Reading the terms of service

Nobody reads these documents end to end, and you do not need to. Use the browser's find function and look for a small number of specific ideas.

What you are being granted. Search for licence. Game terms almost always say that you are given a limited, personal, revocable licence to use the software and the account, rather than ownership of anything. That is the single most important sentence in the document, because everything else follows from it. Items "bought" inside a game are usually licensed in the same way.

Who may hold an account. Search for age and for parent. The terms will set a minimum age, and will usually say what is required where a minor plays with a parent's permission. If you are setting this up for someone under 18, that clause is the one to read in full.

What ends the account. Search for suspend, terminate and inactive. You want to know what behaviour can end an account, whether anything purchased survives that, and whether an account that goes unused for a long period can be closed.

Transfer and sharing. Search for transfer and sell. Most terms forbid selling or sharing accounts. People do it anyway and lose the account; knowing the rule is enough.

Changes. Search for amend or modify. Publishers reserve the right to change terms and to change the game. Look at how changes are notified.

Governing law and disputes. Search for governing law and arbitration. The clause may name a country other than Australia. That does not remove your rights under Australian consumer law, which is covered further down this page.

Reading the privacy notice

Four questions are enough for a first pass.

What is collected? Account details and payment records are obvious. Look also for gameplay telemetry, device information, chat logs and any anti-cheat software that examines your computer while the game runs.
Who is it shared with? Payment processors, hosting providers and analytics companies are common. Advertising partners are the category worth pausing on.
Where is it stored? Large publishers operate internationally; data about an Australian player is often held overseas.
How do you ask for a copy, or for deletion? There should be an address or a form. Note it now, while you are calm and not in a dispute.

In Australia, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the privacy regulator and publishes guidance on the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, including how to make a privacy complaint. Whether a given overseas publisher is covered, and in what way, depends on its circumstances, so the OAIC's own pages are the right source rather than a summary from us.

Reading the store and refund pages

This is the document people skip and later wish they had not. Look for four things: the currency prices are shown in, whether the price you see includes GST, what happens to unspent in-game currency if the account closes, and the publisher's stated position on refunds.

Prices for Australian players may be shown in Australian dollars or in another currency. If they are shown in another currency, your bank's conversion and any international transaction fee are part of the real cost. Checking which currency a store is quoting takes two seconds and avoids an unpleasant statement later.

Visit the World of Warships website Paid link. Pure Stanza receives a commission if an account is created and activated after following it. We do not state this title's prices, terms or inclusions anywhere — only the vendor's own pages do that. How this site is funded.

Classification in Australia

Computer games sold or made available in Australia are subject to the national classification scheme. The Australian Classification Board classifies films and computer games and publishes its decisions, including the consumer advice lines that explain why a title received the rating it did. Its website carries a searchable database of those decisions.

Two honest points about ratings.

A rating describes content, not difficulty, cost or how much time a game will absorb. A title can be classified as suitable for a general audience and still be the most time-consuming thing in the house.

A rating also does not describe the people a player will meet online. Voice and text chat with strangers is not what a classification decision assesses. That is a separate question, and Step 5 deals with it.

We do not state the classification of any particular title on this site, because a rating can be reviewed and a summary here would age badly. Searching the Board's own database takes less time than reading this paragraph.

Your position under Australian consumer law

Buying digital products in Australia is covered by the Australian Consumer Law, which is administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission together with the state and territory consumer agencies. The ACCC publishes plain-language guidance on consumer guarantees and on what businesses may and may not say about their products.

Three general points, each of which the ACCC's own pages set out in more detail than we can here. Consumer guarantees apply to goods and services bought by consumers, and a business's own terms cannot remove them. A business statement that is misleading or deceptive is prohibited conduct, whoever makes it — which is as true of this site as of a game publisher, and is one reason the course refuses to invent facts about the example title. And where something goes wrong, the seller is the first place to raise it, with the relevant consumer agency as the next step.

What we are not going to do is tell you that you are entitled to a refund in a particular situation. That depends on facts we do not have. The ACCC's guidance, and if necessary your state or territory consumer affairs office, is where that question belongs.

Pages that are not the vendor's

Searching for a popular game's name returns a great many pages, and only some of them belong to the publisher. Others are fan sites, news sites, marketing pages — this one included — and a smaller number are set up to collect account details or payments that never reach anyone legitimate.

A few general habits reduce the risk, none of which require any special knowledge. Reach the publisher's site from a link you have checked rather than from an advertisement. Treat offers of free in-game currency, codes or items in exchange for signing in with your game account as the standard shape of a credential scam. Check the address bar before typing a password anywhere. Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, collects reports of scams in Australia and publishes warnings about current approaches, including those that target online accounts.

Pure Stanza is one of the pages that is not the vendor's. It is an independent publication with a commercial relationship disclosed on every page, and the only thing it asks of you is that you read it.

A worked example

Hypothetical — not a real household

The invented household from the homepage spends half an hour on this step. They find the four documents, search the terms for licence, age and terminate, and discover that what they would be creating is a revocable licence rather than a purchase. They note the publisher's privacy contact address in the same file as their six hardware numbers. They look up the title in the Classification Board's database and read the consumer advice line.

They have still not downloaded anything. What they have is a decision they can defend to each other, which is the output this step is designed to produce.

Before you move on

You should have located four documents, read six specific ideas out of the terms, noted where the privacy contact is, confirmed which currency the store quotes, and looked up the classification. If one of those is missing, it is the one most likely to cause an argument later. Step 4 assumes you have decided to go ahead.

Step 3 checklist

Checklist — reading before agreeing

Find the terms of service, the privacy notice, the store or billing terms, and the rules of conduct.
Search the terms for licence and read what you are actually being granted.
Search for age and note the minimum, and any parental permission requirement.
Search for suspend, terminate and inactive, and note what happens to purchases.
Note how the publisher says it will notify changes to the terms.
In the privacy notice, note what is collected, who it is shared with, and where it is stored.
Write down the address or form used for privacy and account requests.
Confirm which currency the store quotes, and whether the price shown includes GST.
Read the publisher's stated refund position before buying anything, not after.
Search the Australian Classification Board database for the title and read the consumer advice.
If the player is under 18, decide whether the rating and the chat features suit them.
Reach the publisher's site from a link you have checked, not from an advertisement.