Chapter Three.
Classification, in-game purchases and randomised rewards
Step 3 of 5
What the Australian Classification Board does
Australia has a national classification system for films, computer games and certain publications, administered through the Australian Classification Board. A classification is a decision about a particular piece of content, expressed as a marking, and usually accompanied by a short line of consumer advice describing why that marking was given — language, themes, violence, and so on. The Board publishes its decisions in a database that anyone can search without an account.
This course does not tell you what any given game is classified, and does not tell you what the markings legally require of a seller or a parent. Both of those change, both depend on the specific title and the specific circumstances, and both are published by the Board and by state and territory authorities in their own words. The honest instruction is: look it up at the source, read the consumer advice line, and treat what you read there as better than anything a third party summarises for you.
What this course can tell you is that the consumer advice line is the more useful half. A marking is a single label covering a whole game; the advice line is where you find out which element produced it. Two games with the same marking can be quite different in what they actually contain.
Looking a game up before you install it
- Open classification.gov.au and find the search for classification decisions.
- Search the game's exact published title. Subtitles matter; a search for the first word alone may return a different product.
- Read the decision and the consumer advice line together, and write both down on your sheet.
- If the title does not appear, note that as a fact rather than filling it in with an overseas rating from another country's system. Markings from other countries are not Australian classification decisions and are not interchangeable with them.
- If the household includes anyone the advice line would matter to, discuss it before installing rather than afterwards.
Two currencies, and why there are two
Nearly every game in this genre runs two kinds of in-game money, and understanding the pair is the whole of the financial literacy this step requires.
The earned currency — often silver, coins or gold — comes from playing. You accumulate it steadily, you spend it on routine upgrades, and it cannot be bought with real money in most designs.
The premium currency — often gems, crystals or shards — is the one that can be bought with real money, and is usually also given out in small quantities as a reward so that every player has a little. It buys the things the earned currency cannot: the randomised rewards described below, extra energy when a session runs dry, extra storage, time skips.
The reason to separate them, from a design point of view, is that a second currency breaks the link between a dollar and an outcome. You do not buy a character for a sum of money. You buy a quantity of gems, and then you spend gems on a chance at a character, and the two conversions are rarely round numbers. That is not an accusation of dishonesty — the exchange rates are usually stated plainly in the shop — but it is why writing down what you spend in Australian dollars, rather than in gems, is the only reliable way to know.
The one arithmetic habit worth keeping
Whenever you are about to spend premium currency, convert it back into Australian dollars first, using the price of the bundle you actually bought it in. If a pack cost twenty dollars and contained a thousand gems, then a three-hundred-gem purchase cost six dollars. Write the six dollars in your notebook, not the three hundred gems. A month of that habit tells you more about your relationship with a game than any amount of reflection.
Randomised rewards you can pay for
A randomised reward is an item you open — a chest, a pack, a summon, a pull — whose contents are determined by chance at the moment of opening. In a collection RPG this is usually the main route to new characters, and premium currency is usually one of the ways to obtain more attempts.
Three plain observations about them, none of which require taking a position on whether they are good or bad.
- The price of an outcome is not knowable in advance. You can know the price of one attempt. You cannot know how many attempts a particular result will take, which means "I will spend thirty dollars to get that character" is not a plan that can be relied on.
- Published odds, where a game provides them, are worth reading. Many publishers disclose the probability of each outcome tier, often in a help menu rather than in the shop. Read them before the first attempt, not after the tenth.
- A spending limit is the only protection that works mechanically. Resolve and enthusiasm are not a method. A figure decided in advance, written down and checked against a bank statement at the end of the month is a method.
If you are curious about where the public policy conversation on these mechanics currently stands in Australia, the regulators themselves publish on it; the ACCC covers consumer protection in digital products, the Classification Board publishes classification criteria and decisions, and the eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families about online games. Those are better sources than a summary written here, and unlike a summary they stay current.
If a person under sixteen will be playing
Paying for a randomised reward is a form of spending whose outcome is left to chance, and it is not something to put in front of a child casually. Nothing in this course should be read as suggesting that purchasable randomised items, or any part of a game that resembles a wager, are suitable for minors. If someone under sixteen will be at the keyboard, three decisions belong to the adult and should be made before the game is installed.
- Whether any payment method will be available to the account at all. The simplest arrangement is that none is.
- Whether the classification decision and consumer advice line you read earlier are acceptable for that person, in your judgement as the adult responsible.
- What the household's rule is about chat and contact with strangers inside the game, which the eSafety Commissioner publishes practical material about.
A limit that survives contact with the game
On the homepage you were asked to write down the largest amount in Australian dollars you would be willing to spend in a month, and told that zero was a complete answer. Here is how to make that figure hold.
| Approach | In its favour | Against it |
|---|---|---|
| Spend nothing at all | Nothing to track, nothing to regret, and the whole of the campaign content remains available to you. No payment details are ever given to the publisher. | Progress through the harder content is slower, and some time-limited events will pass you by. |
| A fixed monthly figure | Gives you a clear rule to check against a bank statement, and removes the need to make the decision again every time a bundle appears. | Only works if it is written down in advance and checked afterwards; a figure held in your head is not a limit. |
There is no third approach being recommended here, and the course does not take a view on which of the two is right for you. It takes a view on only one thing: that the decision is made before the shop is open rather than inside it.
Payment arrangements worth making in advance
- Decide whether a card will be stored on the account at all. Entering details each time is a small, useful piece of friction.
- Check whether your bank offers a notification for every card transaction, and turn it on. Most Australian banking apps do.
- Note the merchant name that will appear on your statement, once you have made a first purchase, so later entries are recognisable rather than mysterious.
- Never buy currency from a third-party seller offering it below the publisher's price. Scamwatch publishes descriptions of how online purchase scams are run, and discounted game currency is a familiar shape among them.
Refunds and your rights in Australia
Publishers set their own refund policies for in-game purchases, and those policies are often restrictive, particularly where a randomised item has already been opened. Read the policy before the first purchase; it is usually linked from the same terms you accept at sign-up.
Separately from any policy, consumers in Australia have guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law that a seller's terms cannot remove, and those guarantees apply to digital products as well as physical ones. If something you paid for does not work, or is not what was described, a published "no refunds" line is not the end of the matter. The ACCC explains what the consumer guarantees are and how to raise a problem with a seller; that guidance, rather than this page, is the thing to read if it happens to you.
The link below is a paid affiliate link; registering, installing and launching the tutorial through it earns Hidden Assets s.r.o. a commission, and costs you nothing extra. If you want to practise this step on a live product, visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website and find the vendor's own terms and purchase information before you create anything.
The example household, at the end of Step 3
Our hypothetical Adelaide pair look the title up in the national classification database and write down both the decision and the consumer advice line as published. They agree on a monthly limit of nothing for the first two months, with a review after that, and they write it on the same sheet as the laptop's specifications. They decide no card will be stored on the account. They have still not installed anything, and they are now three steps in — which is slower than the advertising intended, and exactly the pace this workbook is for.
Before you move on
You should now have the Australian classification decision and consumer advice line for the game you are considering, taken from the Board's own database rather than from a summary. You should understand why premium currency exists and how to convert it back to dollars in your head. You should know that the price of a randomised outcome cannot be known in advance, and that a written limit is the only arrangement that works. And you should have decided, before any shop is open, what your limit is.
Step 4 is the first step where something is actually installed, and it is the step with the most ways to go wrong in the first five minutes.
Checklist for Step 3
- Search the Australian Classification Board's database for the exact title and write down the decision.
- Write down the consumer advice line, not just the marking.
- If no Australian decision appears, record that as unknown rather than substituting an overseas rating.
- Find the game's shop information and identify which currency can be bought with real money.
- Find the published odds for any randomised reward, if the publisher provides them, and read them before the first attempt.
- Write your monthly limit in Australian dollars, with today's date beside it.
- Decide whether a payment method will be stored on the account, and whether one will exist at all.
- Turn on transaction notifications in your banking app if they are available.
- Locate and read the publisher's refund policy before any purchase.
- If anyone under sixteen will play, settle the payment, classification and contact questions with the responsible adult first.