Our method, and our bias

Money health

Every badge has a health rating. A game's verdict is the worst rating among the badges central to how it makes money, plus any minor feature rated Caution or Harmful. Minor extras rated Watch — an optional console online subscription, a version on a subscription service — are shown but don't pull a game down. Badges for things a game used to do (shown as "removed") don't count.

Worst-badge-wins is deliberately strict. A pay-once game with one paid loot box is not a pay-once game for a nine-year-old with a parent's card. Occasionally an editor overrides the verdict when the badges alone would mislead; when that happens the game page says so.

Addictive design (0–5)

This is not a medical or psychological measure, and it doesn't predict whether any particular person will play too much. It counts the engagement hooks deliberately designed into a game.

Each badge carries a weight from 0 to 3 for how strongly it pulls players back. We add up the weights of the badges a game currently uses (minor features count half), divide by 2.5 and round up, capped at 5. A game with no hooks scores 0; any hook at all scores at least 1.

Where the facts come from

• Prices are the regular (non-sale) price on official Australian stores — Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, Xbox, Steam, the App Store and Google Play — on the date shown. For free games we list the in-game purchases instead.
• Age ratings come from the Australian Classification Board, ESRB and PEGI records or the official store listing.
• Reviews are scores published by the outlets themselves, plus OpenCritic and Metacritic aggregates. We link to every review; the one-line summaries are our own words.
• Monetisation badges are our assessment, based on store listings, publisher announcements, rating-board records and reporting. Each badge on a game page says where it shows up.
• History draws on our Video Games & Money series and the family tree of game monetisation.

Each game page shows when its facts were last checked and links its sources. Games change — passes are added, loot boxes are removed — so if something's out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.

Our bias, stated plainly

Price of Play is made by YKYMF Studio. We make games that you buy once and own, with no in-app purchases, ads or data mining. So we have a point of view: we think pay-once is the healthiest way to sell a game, and we built this guide partly because we want more people to see the difference.

We try to keep that view from bending the facts. The rules for verdicts and scores are the same for every game, written down on this page. If one of our own games ever appears here, it will be clearly marked as ours. No publisher pays us, and we don't use affiliate links.

Other guides worth knowing

We looked for anyone already doing this before we built it. A few projects cover parts of it well:

• darkpattern.games — crowd-rated dark patterns in mobile games, technique by technique.
• Family Gaming Database — a parent-focused guide to thousands of games, with cost notes and filters.
• Common Sense Media — age-based reviews with a "products and purchases" score.
• eSafety Commissioner — Australia's online safety regulator's advice on gaming.

What we add is a single page per game that puts the business model — named, explained and rated — next to the reviews, the Australian rating, the price and the parental controls.