Your rights
Your rights when you buy digital game content in Australia
Digital goods bought by a consumer in Australia are not outside the law because they are intangible. The Australian Consumer Law applies to software, in-game items, currencies and subscriptions in the same way it applies to a kettle. What changes is the practical route: who you contact, in what order, and what you need to have written down.
Consumer guarantees, in plain terms
The Australian Consumer Law gives buyers a set of guarantees that attach automatically to goods and services supplied to consumers. They are not a warranty offered by the seller and they cannot be signed away. Applied to digital game content, the ones that come up most often are that what you buy must be of acceptable quality, must match its description, must be reasonably fit for any purpose the seller said it would serve, and that services must be supplied with due care and skill within a reasonable time.
The authoritative explanation of these guarantees, including how they work and what remedies follow, is published by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Where this page and the regulator differ, the regulator is right; our purpose here is to describe how the process tends to go in practice with an overseas game publisher.
Two points are worth holding on to before the detail. The guarantees apply to the supplier, which for an in-game purchase may be the game publisher or may be the app store that processed the transaction — and for an app store purchase the store is usually where a claim starts. And a guarantee failure is about the product, not about regret: a remedy follows a fault, not a change of mind.
Major and minor failures
The remedy available depends on how serious the problem is. In broad terms a failure is major where a reasonable consumer would not have bought the item had they known about it, where it is substantially unfit for its ordinary purpose and cannot easily be made fit within a reasonable time, or where it differs significantly from its description.
| Situation | Usually treated as | Remedy to ask for |
|---|---|---|
| Purchased content never delivered to the account | Major failure | Delivery of the item, or a refund if it cannot be supplied |
| Item materially different from what the storefront described | Major failure | A refund, or a replacement if one exists that matches |
| Subscription charged after cancellation was completed | Failure in the supply of a service | Reversal of the charge for the period after cancellation |
| A bug that prevents an item working, fixable in an update | Minor failure | Repair within a reasonable time; escalate if it does not arrive |
| The game changed and the item is now less useful | Usually not a failure | Nothing enforceable; balance-change risk is inherent to live games |
What the guarantees do not cover
Being clear about the boundary makes a genuine claim stronger, because it keeps the complaint focused on the part that is actionable.
- Change of mind. Buying a currency pack and regretting it is not a guarantee failure. Some vendors and app stores refund anyway as a commercial gesture; that is their discretion, not your entitlement.
- A randomised result you did not like. If the purchase was described as random and the pool was as described, receiving an unwanted item is the product working as sold.
- Difficulty, balance and design decisions. A game becoming harder, or an item being adjusted in an update, is ordinarily a design choice rather than a fault.
- Loss of access after you breached the terms. A suspension for account sharing, trading or cheating is a contractual matter, and the guarantees are not a route around it.
- Service ending. An online game closing is a hard case; what you can seek depends heavily on what was promised at the time of purchase, and it is worth advice rather than assumption.
Terms of service that say otherwise
Terms of service for large online games are frequently written for a global audience and state that all sales are final. A term of that kind cannot exclude the consumer guarantees for a consumer in Australia. Contract terms in standard-form consumer contracts are also subject to the unfair contract terms rules, which the ACCC administers and explains.
In practice, quoting this is useful and rarely sufficient on its own. A first-line support agent works from a script. The more effective approach is to describe the failure factually, state the remedy you are seeking, mention that the purchase was made in Australia and that consumer guarantees apply, and ask for the matter to be escalated if the agent cannot provide the remedy. Politeness and specificity outperform legal citation almost every time.
Purchases made by a child
Charges made by a child on a parent's payment method are common enough that most platforms have a process for them, whatever their published policy says. The account holder should contact the platform that processed the payment first — the app store, not the game, where the purchase went through a store — and explain plainly that the purchase was made by a child without authorisation, giving the dates and amounts.
Two things make this materially more likely to succeed: acting quickly, because platforms apply time limits, and putting a purchase lock in place at the same time, since a repeat of the same event some weeks later will be refused. The steps for each platform are on our page about family settings and purchase locks.
The sequence that works
- Identify the actual supplier. Look at the receipt. If it came from an app store, the store is where a claim starts. If it came from the publisher's own site, the publisher is.
- Use the official support channel. A support form on the vendor's site or store, not a social media reply, so there is a ticket number.
- State the facts and the remedy. Date, amount in AUD, transaction identifier, what was promised, what was received, and exactly what you want done.
- Give a reasonable time. Ten business days is a defensible period for a first response on most matters.
- Escalate inside the vendor. Ask for the complaint to be reviewed by a supervisor, referencing the ticket number.
- Go to the payment provider. Bank or card issuer, with the correspondence attached. Chargebacks have time limits, so do not leave this until the vendor's process has run for months.
- Escalate externally. Consumer affairs or fair trading in your state or territory, the ACCC, or the Australian Financial Complaints Authority if the dispute is with the bank rather than the vendor.
Putting it in writing
A complaint that gets a result usually contains six things and nothing else. Keep it to a screen.
- Account identifier and the transaction identifier from the receipt.
- The date and the amount, stated in AUD as charged.
- What the storefront said the purchase was, quoted as closely as you can.
- What actually happened, in two sentences, without adjectives.
- The remedy sought, named specifically: refund, delivery of the item, or reversal of a charge.
- A note that the purchase was made in Australia and that you understand consumer guarantees to apply.
Escalating it
Each state and territory has a consumer affairs or fair trading agency that handles consumer complaints and can often make contact with a trader on a consumer's behalf. The ACCC takes reports about conduct across the economy and uses them to identify patterns, although it does not resolve individual disputes. Where the dispute has become one with a bank, card issuer or payment provider rather than with the game, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority provides free external dispute resolution for consumers once the provider's own process has been exhausted.
If the complaint concerns how an organisation handled personal information rather than money, the route is different again and runs through the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner after the organisation has had a chance to respond.