Step 5 of 5

Step 5 — Settling in: spending, safety and stopping

The first four steps end at a working account. This one is about the months after that: how in-game purchases are designed, what to do about unpleasant behaviour, how a household agrees rules without an argument, and how to leave cleanly if the game stops being worth the time.

Decide your spending position before the first offer

The useful decision is not "should I buy this?" asked in the moment. It is "what is the most I am willing to spend on this game in a year?" asked while nothing is being offered. Zero is a legitimate answer and plenty of people hold to it for years.

Write the figure down in Australian dollars and keep it with the six hardware values from Step 2. A figure you have written down is much harder to drift past than one you are holding loosely in your head, and it turns every future offer into a simple arithmetic question rather than a judgement call.

How in-game purchases are designed

Online game stores are built with care, and understanding their ordinary features is not cynicism — it just makes them easier to look at calmly.

Two currencies. Real money usually buys a premium currency, and the premium currency buys items. One extra step between your card and the item makes the cost less obvious, and bundles are often sized so that a little is left over.

Time-limited offers. Many stores show items for a limited period. This is a normal retail practice and it is also a reason to apply your written yearly figure rather than deciding under time pressure.

Progress and convenience. Some purchases speed up progress that could also be earned by playing. Whether that is good value depends entirely on how you value your own time, which is a question only you can answer.

The ACCC publishes general guidance on consumer rights and on misleading conduct by businesses, and the Scamwatch service publishes warnings about scams, including offers of discounted in-game currency from sellers who are not the publisher. Buying in-game currency from anyone other than the publisher's own store is also usually a breach of the terms you read in Step 3.

Randomised items and young players

Some games sell containers whose contents are random: you pay a known amount and receive an unknown item. Whether a particular title includes such a feature, and what it discloses about the odds, is stated on that title's own store pages.

Two things are worth saying plainly here. First, a purchase with a random outcome is not the same kind of transaction as buying a named item, and it is reasonable to treat it differently in a household budget. Second, features of this kind are a recognised consideration in how computer games are classified in Australia: the Australian Classification Board publishes classification decisions and consumer advice for games made available here, and its database is where to check what a given title has been rated and on what grounds.

This course does not present purchasable randomised items as suitable entertainment for a child, and a parent deciding about a young player should look at that feature specifically rather than relying on an overall rating. If you want independent material written for families about online risks and supervision, the eSafety Commissioner publishes it at no charge.

Practical controls on payments

• Do not store a card in the game account. Entering the details each time is a small friction that does real work.
• If the account belongs to a young person, keep the payment decision with an adult rather than with the account.
• Check your bank or card statement monthly for the first few months, so the actual total is a known number rather than an impression.
• Check which currency the store quotes. If it is not Australian dollars, your bank's conversion and any international fee are part of the cost.
• If you dispute a charge, raise it with the publisher first and keep the correspondence; the ACCC's guidance explains the usual order of escalation for consumer complaints in Australia.

Chat, reporting and the people you meet

Team-based online games put you in a temporary group with strangers. Most of the time this is unremarkable. Occasionally it is not, and it is much easier to handle if you have already found the controls.

Learn, in advance, four things: how to mute one player, how to turn off voice chat entirely, how to report behaviour to the publisher, and how to leave a match without penalty if there is a way to do so. Step 4 asked you to find them; this is the step where they get used.

Reporting through the game matters because publishers act on their own rules of conduct, which you read in Step 3. Where behaviour goes beyond rudeness — serious abuse, threats, image-based abuse, or material involving a child — Australia has a statutory route. The eSafety Commissioner is the independent regulator for online safety and accepts reports in defined categories, with the process set out on its own site. If you believe someone is in immediate danger, that is a matter for the police rather than for a reporting form.

One quieter point. Keep personal details out of game chat: your full name, your school or workplace, your suburb, your other account names. Not because anything is likely to happen, but because the information has no use in a match and some use elsewhere.

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Agreeing household rules

A shared computer makes a game a shared matter. Four questions settle most of it, and settling them in advance is kinder than settling them during a match.

1. When is the computer available for playing? Specific hours work better than general intentions, particularly where the machine is also used for study or work.
2. What is the yearly spending figure, and who decides to change it? One figure, written down, revisited on a date you choose.
3. What happens about voice chat? Some households are fine with it; some would rather it stayed off. Either is a reasonable position.
4. Who gets told if something unpleasant happens? For a young player especially, knowing there is a person to tell matters more than any setting.

A realistic first three months

Leaving cleanly

Leaving is a skill, and it has two halves that people tend to confuse — which is exactly the distinction Step 1 opened with.

Removing the program frees disk space and nothing else. On Windows, use Settings, then Apps, then the installed apps list, and uninstall from there. On macOS, drag the application to the Bin, or use the publisher's own uninstaller if it provides one. The account continues to exist.

Closing the account is a separate request made to the publisher, usually through a support form. The terms you read in Step 3 will say what happens to anything bought and whether the display name is released. Expect to lose purchases; that follows from the licence wording.

A middle course exists and is often the right one: remove the client, keep the account dormant, and remove any stored payment method. That frees the disk space without burning anything, and lets you return without a decision.

If you want your personal information removed as well, that is a privacy request to the publisher rather than a game matter. The OAIC publishes guidance on access and correction rights under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and on how to complain if a request is not handled properly.

A worked example

Before you close the course

Step 5 checklist