Step 1 of 5

What a PC game account actually is

Before you touch a download button or a sign-up form, it helps enormously to know what the pieces are. Most of the confusion people have in their first week comes from one mix-up: treating three separate things as if they were one thing.

The three things people call "the game"

When someone says they have "got the game", they could mean any of three different things, and the three behave differently.

The first is the client. This is the application that runs on your computer — the files on your hard drive, the icon you click, the thing that draws pictures on your screen. It takes up storage space, it needs a certain level of hardware, and it has to be updated from time to time. A client is just software.

The second is the account. This is a record held on the vendor's servers that says who you are as far as the game is concerned: a username, an email address, a password, and whatever progress you build up. The account is not on your computer. If your laptop dies, the account does not die with it.

The third is the service. An online game is a service running on somebody else's computers, which your client connects to over the internet. Other players are connected to the same service. When people say a game is "down", they mean the service is unavailable, not that anything is wrong with their own machine.

Keeping these apart is not pedantry. It tells you where to look when something goes wrong. A client problem is a problem on your computer. An account problem is a problem to raise with the vendor. A service problem is one you can only wait out.

What registration actually does

Registration is the moment you ask the vendor to create an account for you. In almost every online game, the form asks for an email address, a password you choose, and sometimes a display name that other players will see. That is usually the whole of it.

The email address does three jobs. It is your username in all but name, so the vendor can tell your account apart from everyone else's. It is the channel for recovering your account if you forget your password. And it is, in most cases, the only way the vendor can contact you, including about things you do want to hear — a security alert, a change to the terms.

The password protects everything behind it. Step 4 covers how to choose one properly and why a long passphrase beats a short complicated one. For now the point is narrower: a password you have used anywhere else is not a password, it is a copy of a password, and copies travel.

The display name is a public decision. Other players see it, and in many games it is awkward or impossible to change later. Choosing something that is not your real name, not your email address and not reused from another service is a small act of privacy that costs nothing at the time and is annoying to fix afterwards.

Some games are played through a storefront or platform rather than directly — you may already have an account with that platform, and the game then attaches to it. Others are registered directly with the game's own publisher. Neither arrangement is better, but you should know which one you are in, because it tells you whose password-reset page to visit when you need one.

Enlisted is described by its network as a game set in the atmosphere of the Second World War, and the path into it follows the ordinary three-part pattern this step describes: you register, you confirm your email address, and then you log in to play. We have not been told anything beyond that about how its account system works, so we do not describe its screens. If you want to see them, visit the Enlisted website and look for yourself.

That is a paid affiliate link: IGOA s.r.o. receives a commission if you register through it. The price you pay is unchanged, and the link is not needed to complete this step.

Why the confirmation email exists

After you register, most services send a message to the address you typed and ask you to click a link in it. Until you do, the account usually sits in a limbo state: it exists, but it cannot be used. People find this irritating. It is worth understanding why it is there.

The first reason is simple accuracy. People mistype email addresses constantly. If the address is wrong and nobody checks, the account is permanently unrecoverable the first time you forget the password, because the reset link goes to a stranger or to nowhere.

The second reason is that it proves the address belongs to whoever is registering. Without that check, anyone could create an account using your address, and you would start receiving mail about an account you never opened — and, worse, somebody else would be one password-reset away from an account tied to your mailbox.

The third reason is abuse control. Automated sign-ups are cheap; mailbox access is less cheap. Requiring a confirmed address raises the cost of creating a thousand accounts, which is why nearly every online game does it.

The practical consequence for you is that the confirmation step is not a hurdle to get past as fast as possible. It is the one moment where a wrong address is still easy to fix. Read the address on the confirmation screen before you close it. If no message arrives within a few minutes, check the junk or spam folder before you register a second time — two half-made accounts are harder to untangle than one.

There is a security side to this as well, covered properly in Step 4. A confirmation message you were expecting, which arrives seconds after you registered, is almost certainly genuine. A confirmation message you were not expecting is a signal that somebody has typed your address into a sign-up form somewhere, and the correct response is to ignore the link entirely, not to click it to "cancel".

What you are not agreeing to

Registering for a game account is a smaller act than it feels like. It is worth being clear about the limits, because the anxiety people bring to it is usually attached to the wrong things.

You are not giving a payment commitment. Creating an account does not by itself authorise any charge. A charge needs payment details, which are entered separately and deliberately — Step 5 deals with that, including how to decide on a limit before you are in front of a purchase screen.

You are not handing over your identity documents. An ordinary game registration does not ask for a passport, a driver's licence or a bank account. If a sign-up form for a game asks for any of those, stop and treat it as suspicious. Scamwatch publishes current information on how fraudulent sign-up pages work at scamwatch.gov.au.

You are not making yourself permanently findable. Your display name is public; your email address, in most games, is not shown to other players. If a service does show it, that is unusual and worth knowing before you register rather than after.

What you are agreeing to is a licence and a privacy notice — a contract about how you may use the software and a statement about what the vendor does with your data. Those are real documents with real contents, and Step 3 is entirely about reading them without reading all forty pages.

The worked example: the household's first decision

The hypothetical household introduced on the home page — two adults, one fourteen-year-old, one Windows laptop and one Linux desktop — starts here, before any software is installed. This is an invented illustration used to make the steps concrete; it is not a report of anyone's experience and it says nothing about how any product performed.

Their first decision is whose account it is. They settle on one account for the teenager, registered to an email address the teenager can actually open, with an adult knowing the recovery address. That avoids the common mess where a parent registers everything to their own mailbox and then cannot work out, two years later, which of four accounts belongs to whom.

Their second decision is which machine the client goes on. They have not checked the hardware yet, so they deliberately do not decide this today — that is Step 2's job. Writing "unknown, check in Step 2" on a piece of paper is a legitimate outcome of Step 1.

Their third decision is the display name. They pick something unrelated to the family name, the school and the teenager's social media handles. It takes four minutes and it is the cheapest privacy decision available in the whole process.

Words used in this step

Client

The game software installed on your own computer.

Account

The record of you held on the vendor's servers: email address, password, progress.

Service

The vendor's online system that your client connects to so you can play with other people.

Display name

The public name other players see. Usually not the same as your login.

Licence agreement

The contract setting out how you may use the software. Also called an end-user licence agreement, or EULA.

Two-factor authentication

A second proof of identity in addition to your password, usually a code from an app on your phone. Covered in Step 4.