Reference · Money
In-game spending and your rights in Australia
In-game purchases are consumer transactions, and the Australian Consumer Law applies to them. Knowing who you bought from, what the guarantees cover, and the order in which to raise a problem resolves most disputes without anyone needing to quote legislation.
The short version
Work out whether the seller was the game vendor or the platform storefront, because that decides who you complain to first. Convert currency packs to a price per unit in AUD before comparing them. Consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law apply to digital products and cannot be removed by a business's own terms — the ACCC publishes the detail. Raise the problem with the business first, then with your state or territory fair trading office.
Who you are actually buying from
A purchase inside a game can involve two or three parties, and readers often discover this only when something goes wrong. If the purchase went through a platform storefront, that storefront processed the payment and its refund process applies first. If it went through the vendor's own payment page, the vendor is the seller. Where a desktop client takes payment directly, the vendor is usually the seller even when the same game charges through a storefront on a phone.
Establish this before anything else, because a complaint sent to the wrong party stalls for weeks. The receipt answers it: whoever issued the receipt and whose name appears on the card or account statement is the party to approach. Keep receipts for in-game purchases for the same reason you keep them for anything else — they are the evidence that the transaction happened and on what terms.
Converting a currency pack to AUD
Games in this genre price their currency in packs of uneven size, which makes direct comparison awkward. The remedy is to reduce every pack to a single figure: the price in AUD per unit of premium currency, then the price per summon or per refill, since those are the things you actually buy.
Worked example — illustrative arithmetic, not any product's prices
Suppose a game offers three packs: 300 units for $7.99, 1,000 units for $24.99, and 5,500 units for $119.99. The unit prices are about 2.7, 2.5 and 2.2 cents respectively, so the largest pack is roughly 18 per cent better per unit than the smallest.
Now suppose a single summon costs 150 units. Using the largest pack, one summon costs about $3.27. If the title publishes a pity threshold of, say, 100 summons, the bounded worst case for that character is around $327 — a figure that looks entirely different from "$7.99 for a starter pack", and it is the figure the decision should be made against. Where no pity threshold exists, there is no bounded worst case at all, which is itself the most important thing to notice.
Do the same arithmetic for energy refills, expressed as cost per additional run, and for a battle pass, expressed as cost per month. Three numbers — cost per summon, cost per run, cost per month — describe a title's economics well enough to compare it with any other.
What the Australian Consumer Law covers
The Australian Consumer Law applies to goods and services supplied to consumers in Australia, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is the national regulator responsible for it. Its site sets out the consumer guarantees in full, along with how they apply to digital products and online purchases.
Two features of that framework matter here. First, the guarantees are automatic: they apply by operation of law, and the ACCC's published guidance is clear that a business cannot remove them through its own terms and conditions or a notice stating that no refunds are given. Second, the law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct in trade or commerce, which covers the claims a business makes about what a purchase delivers.
What the framework does not do is guarantee that you will enjoy a product, that a randomised reward will fall your way, or that a game will keep a feature you liked. Those are outcomes rather than defects. The guarantees address a product that does not do what it was said to do, that is not supplied at all, or that was sold on a misleading basis.
Refunds, and the order to ask in
- Go to the seller. Storefront or vendor, as established above. State what was purchased, when, what went wrong, and what outcome you want. Attach the receipt.
- Use the published process. Most storefronts and vendors have a refund request form or support category for purchases. Using it creates a record, which matters if the matter escalates.
- Keep it factual and dated. A short account with dates and receipt numbers is handled faster than a long one.
- Escalate to fair trading. If the seller does not resolve it, your state or territory consumer affairs or fair trading office handles individual consumer disputes. The ACCC's site explains the division of responsibility and links to each office.
- Report the conduct. The ACCC takes reports about business conduct. It does not resolve individual disputes, but reports inform what it acts on.
What to watch out for
Reversing a charge through your bank before asking the seller is tempting and usually counterproductive. Vendors commonly treat a reversed payment as grounds to restrict or close the account, which can cost you everything else on it — including purchases that were never in dispute. Raise it with the seller first, and keep a payment dispute in reserve for a genuine failure to respond or a transaction you did not authorise at all.
Purchases made by children
Where a child has made purchases on an adult's payment method, the practical route is the same: contact the seller, explain the circumstances, and ask. Storefronts and vendors have processes for this, and outcomes vary with the facts and the amounts involved.
Preventing a repeat is more reliable than resolving one. Both major desktop operating systems and the platform storefronts offer purchase authorisation controls that require a password or an adult's approval for every transaction, and removing a stored payment method from a shared machine is simple and effective. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families on games and spending, and a title's entry in the national classification database carries the consumer advice attached to its classification. A game with purchasable randomised rewards should not be assumed suitable for a younger player on the strength of its artwork.
Setting a limit that holds
A limit set in advance behaves differently from one set in the moment, and the genre's design puts most purchase decisions into the moment — after a disappointing summon session, at the end of an event, as a banner closes. The countermeasure is structural rather than a matter of resolve.
- Decide a monthly figure in AUD you would be content to lose entirely, and write it down before installing.
- Fund it with a prepaid or gift balance rather than a stored card, so the limit enforces itself.
- Do not store a payment method in the game or the storefront if you are inclined to reconsider purchases later.
- Record what you spend, in one place, each month. The monthly total is the figure that matters; the individual prices are designed not to be.
- Review the total against what you actually got, not against what you hoped for.
Common questions
Do consumer guarantees apply to digital purchases?
The Australian Consumer Law applies to goods and services supplied to consumers, and the ACCC's published guidance addresses digital products and online purchases specifically. How the guarantees apply to a particular transaction depends on its facts, which is why the regulator's own material at accc.gov.au is the source to read rather than a summary here.
Can a game say no refunds?
A business can set its own policy for change-of-mind requests, which the law does not require it to accept. What it cannot do, according to the ACCC's published guidance, is use that policy to remove the consumer guarantees the law provides. A blanket statement that no refunds are given in any circumstances does not override those guarantees.
What if a game shuts down?
In-game items are generally licensed rather than owned, and the terms of service set out what happens at closure. It is worth reading that section before spending meaningfully, since it is one of the few parts of a terms document with a direct financial consequence. Where a closure is handled in a way you believe is misleading or unfair, the ACCC accepts reports about business conduct.
Related reading
Randomised rewards covers the probability arithmetic behind summon spending. Account security covers unauthorised access and the risks of unofficial currency sellers. The evaluation checklist puts pricing among the things to settle before installing.