Money terms

Costs, currency and membership terms

The commercial vocabulary of online games exists to make spending feel unlike spending. None of it is hidden — memberships, premium currency, bundles and passes are all described openly — but the words are arranged so that the distance between an amount in Australian dollars and the thing received is several steps long. Shortening that distance is mostly a matter of knowing what each word does.

Quick answer

Three structures cover nearly every purchase in this category: a recurring membership, a one-off purchase of premium currency later spent in a shop, and a direct purchase of a specific item. The first renews until cancelled, the second converts dollars into a token whose exchange rate is set by the seller, and the third is the only one where the price and the thing line up exactly.

The terms, defined

Free-to-play: The client and an initial portion of content cost nothing. What that portion contains differs enormously between titles, and it is the single thing most worth checking on a vendor’s own page before installing anything.
Membership: A subscription billed weekly, monthly or annually that unlocks areas, features or items while it is active. Where a membership lapses, progress made inside it normally remains on the account but becomes inaccessible until it is renewed.
Recurring payment: An authorisation to charge on a schedule until cancelled, rather than a series of decisions to pay. The cancellation route is set by whoever takes the payment, which is not always the game publisher.
Premium currency: A token bought with money and spent inside the game. Two features are worth noticing: it is usually sold in amounts that do not divide evenly into shop prices, leaving a residue that encourages another purchase, and once bought it is rarely convertible back.
Soft currency: Currency earned by playing rather than paying. Games commonly run both, with the valuable items priced in the one that costs money.
Bundle: Several items sold together at a single price, with a saving quoted against the seller’s own separate prices. It is a discount inside one shop, not a market comparison.
Season pass: A purchase unlocking a track of rewards released over a fixed period. Its structure ties value to how much you play within the window, which is worth weighing before rather than during.
Loot box: A purchasable item whose contents are randomised. Where a game sells them, that is a material fact for anyone buying on behalf of a child, and the Australian Classification Board publishes how individual titles are classified in Australia.
Storefront: The in-game shop. Prices shown to an Australian account are normally displayed in AUD; where a foreign currency is involved, the amount on your statement can differ from the figure on screen because of conversion and card fees.
Entitlement: The server-side record that your account may use what you bought. It is attached to the account, not the device, and it is lost with the account.

Who takes the payment changes what you do next

The same purchase can run through entirely different companies depending on where it was made, and that decides where a refund request goes.

Payment routes and their consequences
Purchase made	Who bills you	Where to cancel or ask for a refund	Where it appears on a statement
In an app on iOS or Android	The app store	The store account’s subscriptions and purchase history	Under the store’s name, not the game’s
On the publisher’s website	The publisher or its payment processor	The publisher’s account settings and support	Under the publisher or processor name
Through a prepaid card or code	The retailer at the point of sale	The retailer, before redemption; after redemption, rarely anywhere	As a retail purchase

Cancelling inside a game rarely cancels a subscription billed by an app store — deleting the app certainly does not. That single mismatch produces more unwanted renewals than any other thing in this vocabulary.

Working out what something actually cost

A worked example, using round numbers chosen only to show the arithmetic rather than to describe any particular game’s prices.

Converting a token price back into dollars

Suppose a shop sells tokens in packs, and the item you want is priced at 1,200 tokens while the packs are sold in units of 500. Buying enough means three packs — 1,500 tokens — so the real cost of the item is three packs, not 1,200 tokens’ worth, and 300 tokens sit on the account afterwards with nothing they can be spent on alone.

To price it in Australian dollars: take the AUD price of the number of packs actually required, not the price implied by dividing one pack’s cost by its tokens. The two figures differ whenever pack sizes and item prices are not multiples of each other, which is the normal case rather than the exception.

Refunds, and what Australian law adds

A seller’s refund policy and your rights under the Australian Consumer Law are separate things, and the second does not disappear because the first says no. Consumer guarantees apply automatically to goods and services supplied to consumers in Australia, including digital products, and a term in a licence agreement cannot remove them. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes what the guarantees cover and what remedies are available when something is not as described or does not work.

In practice the order that works is: ask the seller first, in writing, describing the problem plainly; if the seller bills through an app store, ask the store as well, since it processed the payment; and if neither resolves it, the ACCC’s site explains the next steps and where state and territory consumer protection agencies fit in. A chargeback raised before any of that commonly results in a suspended account, which turns one problem into two.

What to watch out for

Trials that convert silently. The date a trial becomes a charge is stated at sign-up and almost never repeated. Note it at the time.
Prices quoted in a foreign currency. The conversion and any card fee are set by your bank, not the shop, so the statement figure is the real one.
“Save 40%” on a bundle. The comparison is against the same seller’s own prices and tells you nothing about value.
Purchases enabled on a child’s device. Device-level and app store restrictions are the reliable control; in-game settings are not always sufficient on their own.
Third-party sellers of in-game currency. Buying currency or accounts outside the publisher’s own shop breaches most terms of service and is a common vehicle for fraud. Scamwatch collects reports of this kind.

Before spending anything, five checks

Confirm whether the thing you want sits behind a one-off purchase or a recurring membership.
Find where that payment would be cancelled, before making it.
Convert any token price into the number of packs actually needed, and price those in AUD.
Check whether the item is cosmetic or affects progress, if that distinction matters to you.
Check the purchase settings on the device, particularly if it is shared with a child.

None of this requires distrust of a publisher. It requires only that the words in a storefront be read as the commercial instruments they are, which is exactly how the people who wrote them intended them to work.