Step 3 of 5

Classification, terms and your consumer rights

Nobody reads forty pages of legal text, and this step does not ask you to. It asks you to find six specific things, which takes about ten minutes once you know where they live.

What classification is, and where to look it up

In Australia, computer games made available to the public are classified, and the classification is displayed with a marking such as G, PG, M, MA 15+ or R 18+. The classification is a statement about the content and who it is considered suitable for. Some of those markings are advisory and some are legally restricted, and the authoritative explanation of which is which comes from the classification system itself rather than from a site like this one.

The body that publishes classifications and the rules behind them is the Australian Classification Board, at classification.gov.au. Its site carries a searchable database of classified titles and plain explanations of what each marking means. We link to it rather than reproducing any rating or age threshold here, because a figure typed into a page like this one is exactly the kind of detail that goes stale and misleads somebody a year later.

Looking up a title takes about a minute. Search the database for the name, and read both the classification and the consumer advice attached to it. If a title you are considering does not appear, that is a question for the vendor or the storefront, not something to guess about.

Where a game is bought or registered through an overseas storefront, you may see a rating from another country's system alongside or instead of the Australian one. Those systems use different letters and different thresholds. The Australian classification is the one that applies here, and the Board's own site is where to confirm it.

Consumer advice lines, and what they are for

Underneath the classification marking there is usually a short line of consumer advice — a description of the content that drove the classification. For many people that line is more useful than the marking itself, because it says what is actually in the game rather than only who it is for.

If you are setting a game up for somebody else, read the advice line to them. A household disagreement about a game is much easier to have in advance, with a published description in front of you, than halfway through a weekend.

If the game involves purchases, or elements of chance, that is often noted as well. That note is worth taking seriously, and the section below on randomised items explains why.

Reading a licence agreement in ten minutes

A licence agreement — the end-user licence agreement, or EULA — is the contract about how you may use the software. There is usually a separate terms-of-service document about how you may use the online service. You will be asked to accept both, often with a single tick box.

You are not going to read every clause, and nobody expects you to. Instead, use the find function in your browser or document viewer and search for six things. Each search takes under a minute.

1. Account termination. Search for "terminate" or "suspend". This tells you on what grounds the vendor can close your account and what happens to anything you have paid for if they do.
2. Purchases and virtual items. Search for "virtual" or "purchase". This tells you what you are actually buying when you buy an in-game item — in most agreements it is a licence to use something, not ownership of a thing.
3. Refunds. Search for "refund". Note what the document says, and then read the section below, because what a document says and what Australian law requires are two different questions.
4. Changes to the agreement. Search for "change" or "amend". Most agreements allow the vendor to change the terms; what differs is whether they must tell you, and how.
5. Conduct rules. Search for "conduct" or "prohibited". This is the list of behaviour that gets accounts closed, and it is worth reading properly if the account is for a teenager.
6. Age. Search for "age" or "minimum". Many services set their own minimum age for holding an account, separate from any classification.

The privacy notice: four questions

The privacy notice is a separate document from the licence. Read it with four questions in mind, and you can skim the rest.

What is collected? Look for the list. Account details are expected. Anything about contacts, location or other software on your machine is worth pausing over.

Who is it shared with? Look for "third parties" or "partners". A vague answer here is itself an answer.

Where is it stored? Many services store data overseas, which is lawful and common, but you are entitled to know it.

How do you get it back or get it deleted? There should be an address or a form. If the document does not say, that is a mark against it.

Privacy in Australia is overseen by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which publishes guidance for individuals about their rights and how to complain at oaic.gov.au. The OAIC's own material is the right source for what the Privacy Act requires; it is not something to take second-hand from a publisher like us.

What Australian law guarantees you anyway

This is the part most people do not know, and it is the reason this step exists. In Australia, consumers have guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law that a contract cannot take away. A clause in a licence agreement that purports to exclude them does not succeed in excluding them.

Those guarantees cover things like goods and services being of acceptable quality and matching their description. Digital products, including games and in-game purchases, are covered by the consumer guarantees in the same way other products are. What remedy you are entitled to depends on how serious the problem is.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission administers this law and publishes plain-English explanations of the guarantees, of what counts as a major failure, and of how to pursue a remedy, at accc.gov.au. We deliberately do not paraphrase the detail here: when you need it you need the current, official wording, not a summary written by a third party.

It also prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct in trade. That applies to anyone selling or promoting a product in Australia, including the publisher of this site. It is one of the reasons this course does not quote prices, does not score products and does not describe a product's features beyond what the vendor states.

The practical takeaway is modest but real: if a purchase does not work as described, "the terms said no refunds" is not the end of the conversation. Start with the seller, in writing, and if that goes nowhere the ACCC's site explains where complaints go next.

Randomised items and simulated gambling

Some games sell items whose contents are randomised — you pay a known amount and receive an unknown item. Some include activities that resemble gambling without involving money leaving the game. These features attract attention from regulators and from parents, and both for good reason.

Two things are worth being clear about. First, a randomised purchase is a purchase: the money is spent whether or not the result is one you wanted, and spending can accumulate quickly because each individual amount is small. Second, a feature that looks like gambling should not be treated as suitable for a child simply because it is inside a game that is otherwise classified for them.

If a game you are considering includes either of these, the classification entry and its consumer advice line are the first place to check, and the Classification Board's site is where to check them. For a household with a minor, the useful conversation is the one you have before the account exists, about who holds the payment details and what the agreed limit is. Step 5 gives that conversation a structure.

We do not state whether Enlisted contains either of these things. The vendor does not state it in the material we have, so we will not invent an answer. If it matters to your decision — and it reasonably might — look it up on the classification database and on the vendor's own site before registering. You can visit the Enlisted website to read what it says.

Paid affiliate link: a commission is paid to IGOA s.r.o. for registrations made through it. Your price is unaffected, and nothing in this step depends on following it.

The worked example: the household reads the small print

Our hypothetical household — an invented illustration, not a real family — now has a machine chosen and a game in mind. Three adults-and-teenager decisions get made in half an hour.

They look the title up on the classification database together and read the consumer advice line out loud. The fourteen-year-old is in the room for this, which is the point: a rule the teenager has heard the reasoning for is a rule that survives contact with a Saturday night.

They save the licence agreement as a dated PDF and run the six searches. The clause they actually act on is the one about account termination for conduct breaches, because it changes how the adults talk about behaviour in voice chat. Nothing else in the document surprises them.

Finally they agree, in advance, that any purchase goes through an adult, and that the payment details are not stored in the account. That decision takes two minutes now and removes an entire category of argument later.