About this site and how the course is written
Pale Matrix publishes one thing: a five-step beginner's course on joining an online game, written for readers in Australia. This page says who publishes it, how it was put together, and who pays for it.
Who publishes this
Pale Matrix is published by East European Media Service s.r.o., a company registered in the Czech Republic.
East European Media Service s.r.o.
U valu 862/2, Ruzyně, 161 00 Praha 6, Czech Republic
Company registration: 04389174
info@palematrix.online
The site is not connected to any game company. It is not an official site, a reseller, a partner or an authorised source for any product named anywhere on it, and no vendor has reviewed, approved or sponsored the course.
Where the course needs authorship, the author is the East European Media Service s.r.o. editorial team. There are no personal bylines on this site, no staff pages and no photographs of anyone, because none of that would tell you anything useful about whether the course is accurate.
Editorial method
How the course was structured
We started from the order in which the questions actually arrive in a household: what is this, what do we need, what does it say, how do we set it up, and what happens afterwards. Each of those became a step, and each step was then written to end in something the reader can do rather than something they have been told.
Because it is a sequence rather than five articles, later steps rely on the answers written down in earlier ones. Step 4 assumes you chose a device in Step 2; Step 5 assumes you found the cancellation method in Step 3. We decided that one connected course was more useful than five pages each trying to stand alone.
What the sources are
Three kinds of statement appear in the course, and each is handled differently.
- Statements about Australian rules — classification, consumer rights, privacy, online safety and scams — link to the government body responsible: the Australian Classification Board, the ACCC, the OAIC, the eSafety Commissioner, Scamwatch and the ACSC. We link rather than quote figures or thresholds, because those change and the source is the only reliable copy.
- Statements about how the category generally works — charging models, launchers, system requirements, parental controls — are written as general guidance that applies across the category, not as a walkthrough of any one product's screens.
- Statements about a named product come only from what that vendor or its affiliate programme publishes. Where the vendor says nothing — prices in Australian dollars, for instance — the course says that the vendor does not state it, rather than filling the gap.
What we do not publish
No test results, no benchmarks, no scores and no awards, because we do not run tests and would not expect you to believe us if we said we did. No reviews, no learner quotes and no personal experiences. The household that appears in each step is an invented illustration, clearly labelled as such, with no name and nothing to say about how any game performed.
How often it is reviewed
The course is reviewed twice a year, and sooner if we become aware of a change in the Australian material it points to or in the published terms of a product it names. The review date at the foot of every page is the date the text last changed, not the date the page was generated. Corrections are made in place; if a correction changes advice rather than wording, the review date moves with it.
The commercial relationship, stated plainly
This site is funded by affiliate commission. Star Stable Online, the online horse-riding game named in the course, is a product we have a commercial relationship with: links to it are paid affiliate links, and if you create an account after following one, the affiliate network that operates the link pays us a commission.
That relationship is the reason Star Stable Online is the product named in the course, and we would rather write that sentence than imply the choice was purely editorial. What the commission does not decide is what the steps say: the checklists, the warnings about randomised purchases, the instruction to read the cancellation terms first, and the repeated statement that you can finish the course without spending anything all stand regardless of whether anyone follows a link.
The full detail — where the links appear, what we are paid for, and what would have to be true for us to remove a product — is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
There is nothing to join here. No account, no newsletter, no form, no certificate and no record of who has read what. If you want to tell us something, the only channel is email, and our Contact page explains what happens to it.
What this site is not
It is not a news outlet and does not report on anything. It is not a blog and contains nobody's opinions presented as experience. It is not professional advice: nothing here is legal, financial or security advice, and the Terms and Conditions say so in the ordinary way.
It is also not training in any formal sense. There is no registration, no assessment and no certificate, because a course in this subject needs none of those to be useful, and offering them would imply a standing we do not have.