Day 3.

Step 3 — Reading the classification, the terms and the purchase information

DEPTH 03 of 05  ·  HAUL 8 checks  ·  CREW you, alone

Step 3 of 5

This is the step most people skip, which is exactly why it is worth doing slowly. It takes about half an hour and it is the only part of the course that deals with what you are agreeing to rather than what you are installing.

None of this is legal advice. It is a reading method: which documents exist, where they usually are, and which handful of clauses in each one is worth your attention as an ordinary consumer in Australia.

The four documents, and what each one is for

Any desktop game offered to Australians will have, somewhere, four separate pieces of writing. They do different jobs and they are often confused with one another.

The classification entry

A public record of how the game has been classified in Australia and what consumer advice accompanies that classification. It is maintained by the national classification scheme, not by the publisher.

The terms of service or end user licence

The contract between you and the publisher. It covers what you may do with the software, what happens to your account, and how disputes are handled.

The privacy notice

What the publisher collects about you, why, who it is shared with and where it is stored.

The purchase and refund information

What is sold inside the game, in what currency, and what the publisher says about refunds. This is also where consumer guarantees under Australian law come into play.

The marketing page is not one of these. It is a description, and a description is not a term. If something matters to you — cost, cancellation, what happens to an account that goes unused — find it in one of the four documents rather than in a headline.

Looking up an Australian classification

Classification in Australia is a national scheme with published markings and published consumer advice. The authoritative source is the Australian Classification Board, whose site explains what each marking means, publishes the guidelines that classification decisions are made under, and provides a searchable database of classified titles.

1. Open classification.gov.au and find the search for classified titles.
2. Search for the exact name of the game. Names that are similar but not identical are often different products.
3. Read both parts of the result: the classification marking itself, and the consumer advice beneath it. The consumer advice is the sentence that says what produced the marking, and it is far more informative than the letter.
4. If in-game purchases are relevant to your decision, read the Board's own material on how purchases involving elements of chance are treated. Take that from the Board rather than from a summary on any other site, including this one.

This course deliberately states no rating, no age threshold and no legal cut-off for any title. Those are facts that belong to the source and change over time; repeating them second-hand is how misinformation spreads. Look them up.

Reading terms of service without reading all of them

Terms of service for a large online game typically run to several thousand words. Reading every line is admirable and rare. Reading five specific things is achievable, and catches most of what a new player later wishes they had known.

1. What you own. Almost universally, you are licensed to use the software and the in-game items rather than owning them. Find the sentence that says so, so that nothing later surprises you.
2. Account suspension and termination. What behaviour can end an account, and what happens to purchased items if it does.
3. Inactivity. Whether an account that is unused for a long period can be closed or reset.
4. Changes to the game and to the terms. How the publisher may change content, prices or rules, and how you are told.
5. Governing law and disputes. Which country's law is named and what dispute process applies. For a consumer in Australia, this is the clause most worth noticing — and worth reading alongside the next section.

Use your browser's find-on-page function and search for the words terminate, inactive, refund, governing and modify. Five searches is a reasonable reading of a long document.

The privacy notice, and what it should tell you

A privacy notice for a game account should answer four questions in plain terms: what is collected, what it is used for, who else receives it, and whether it leaves Australia. If you cannot find those four answers in a few minutes of reading, that is itself a useful observation about the document.

The framework those notices are written against, for organisations covered by it, is the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes the principles in full, along with plain-English guidance on what rights of access and correction look like in practice. It is also the body a privacy complaint goes to after the organisation itself has had a chance to respond.

You can see the same structure applied to a very small site on this site's own privacy policy, which walks through each principle in turn.

Purchase information and the consumer guarantees

In-game purchases in these games are sold as bundles of the hard currency described in Step 1, and occasionally as one-off packages or recurring passes. Three things are worth establishing before any of that is in front of you.

First, the currency of the price. A price shown to an Australian may be in Australian dollars or in another currency converted by your payment provider. Check which, because the second case can include a conversion fee that the game never mentions.

Second, whether anything recurs. A pass that renews monthly is a different commitment from a one-off purchase, and the renewal terms sit in the purchase information rather than on the button.

Third, what Australian law gives you regardless of what a publisher's own refund page says. Goods and services supplied to consumers in Australia come with consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law, and a business cannot contract out of them. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission explains what those guarantees cover and what remedies exist when something is not as described. Read it there; it is short, and it is the backstop behind every “all sales final” notice you will ever see.

Weighing a first purchase, if you ever consider one

Registering: email address or an existing account

Registration for these games is usually offered two ways: create an account with an email address and a password, or connect an account you already hold with a large platform. Both are ordinary; they trade different things.

An email address and a password keeps the game account separate from everything else and means the publisher receives no information from a third party about you. It requires you to manage one more password, which a password manager or your browser's built-in one handles.

Connecting an existing account is faster and means one fewer password, but it links the two services and generally shares some profile information between them. If you choose it, read the permission screen rather than clicking through it, because that screen is where the sharing is actually described.

Imitation sites and offers that are not from the vendor

Popular games attract imitation. Pages offering free premium currency, account boosts or modified installers are not run by the publisher, and the terms of service almost always prohibit using them. The practical rule is narrow and easy: install from the vendor's own site, and obtain currency only inside the game.

If you want to understand the general patterns these offers follow, Scamwatch, operated by the National Anti-Scam Centre, publishes information on scams reported in Australia and how to report one. It is a reference for the shape of the problem, and it is where a report goes if you encounter something.

The example title at this step

For the title this course uses as its worked example, the four documents are published by the vendor and the classification entry is published by the Board. Neither is reproduced here. What is stated about the title in this course remains only what the vendor's programme states: that a person registers on the landing page, installs the game and launches the tutorial, and that the desktop versions are for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Paid affiliate link. Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website to read the vendor's own terms, privacy notice and purchase information — Softprism Online is paid a commission for registrations and installations made through this link, at no extra cost to you.

The household in the spare room

The remaining member of the hypothetical household spends twenty-five minutes on this step. They search the classification database for the exact title, read the consumer advice sentence rather than only the marking, and write both down.

They then open the terms and run the five find-on-page searches. The clause about inactive accounts is the one they did not expect, so it goes in the notebook. In the purchase information they check the currency of the listed prices and whether any item renews, and they write “AUD or converted?” next to the answer so it is not forgotten.

They do not register during this step. Step 3 is reading; Step 4 is doing, and keeping the two apart is what stops a decision being made at the speed of a button.

Before you move on

Checklist for Step 3

• I have found the title's classification entry and read the consumer advice, not just the marking.
• I have located the terms of service and run the five searches: terminate, inactive, refund, governing, modify.
• I know what happens to an account of mine that goes unused for a long time.
• I have read the privacy notice far enough to answer: what is collected, why, who else gets it, and whether it leaves Australia.
• I have checked whether listed prices are in Australian dollars or converted.
• I have checked whether anything on offer renews automatically.
• I have read the ACCC's page on consumer guarantees once, so I know what cannot be contracted away.
• I have decided to install only from the vendor's own site, and I have not registered yet.