Innovate Hub Working out the cost
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Working out what it costs, in AUD
In-game shops price things in a currency they invented, in bundles that do not divide evenly, for rewards that are decided by chance. This page is the arithmetic for turning all of that back into dollars, on whichever title you are looking at.
Short answer. Find the smallest currency bundle and divide its AUD price by the units it gives. Multiply that by the cost of one draw to get the real price per draw. Then read the published drop rates and work out what the advertised outcome would cost on average. Do this once, before deciding anything, and set a monthly figure in advance.
On this page
Why the price is hard to see
Three ordinary design choices combine to make the real cost of a purchase difficult to read, and none of them is unique to this genre.
The first is the invented currency. Paying AUD for gems and then spending gems on draws puts a conversion between the money and the thing being bought, and conversions are where intuition fails. The second is bundle sizing: currency is sold in amounts that do not divide neatly into what things cost, so a purchase of exactly what is needed is usually impossible and a residue is left behind. The third is randomised acquisition. A draw does not buy a named character; it buys a chance at one, which means a price per outcome exists only as an average over many draws.
None of this is hidden. All of it is visible in the shop and in the published rates, and all of it becomes straightforward once it is written down. Fifteen minutes with a calculator produces a number that no amount of reading marketing copy will.
The method, in four steps
Find the unit price of the currency
Open the shop and list every bundle with its AUD price and the units it gives. Divide price by units for each. The smallest bundle usually has the worst rate and the largest the best, which is what the discount labels are describing.
Find what one draw costs
In units of the in-game currency. Note whether a multi-draw is priced at a discount, and whether a separate ticket currency exists that can be earned without paying.
Multiply to get the real price of one draw
Unit price times draw cost. This is the number that is never displayed anywhere, and it is the one worth writing down.
Work out the average cost of the outcome you want
Take the published rate for the tier you are interested in, invert it to get the expected number of draws, and multiply by the price per draw. The result is an average, not a price — the next section explains why the distinction matters.
Worked example: from shop to real cost
All figures below are invented for the demonstration. Substitute the ones in the shop in front of you.
- Smallest bundle: 500 gems for AUD 7.99 → 1.598 cents per gem.
- Largest bundle: 12,000 gems for AUD 149.99 → 1.25 cents per gem.
- One draw costs 300 gems.
- At the smallest bundle rate: 300 × 1.598 cents = AUD 4.79 per draw.
- At the largest bundle rate: 300 × 1.25 cents = AUD 3.75 per draw.
Now suppose the published rate for the top tier is 0.5 per cent. On average that is one in 200 draws, so 200 × AUD 4.79 = AUD 958 at the smallest bundle rate, or AUD 750 at the largest. That figure is an average across many attempts, not a price or a cap. Some players reach it far sooner and some far later.
Reading published drop rates
Most titles publish the probability of each outcome tier, and the figure is usually reachable from the draw screen itself. It is worth finding before rather than after, and worth reading precisely, because two things are commonly misread.
A rate of 0.5 per cent does not mean that a character arrives on the two-hundredth attempt. Each draw is independent, so the two-hundredth attempt has the same 0.5 per cent chance as the first. Long runs without a result are an ordinary consequence of that, not evidence of anything going wrong. And a rate for a tier is not a rate for a specific character — if the top tier contains forty characters, the chance of any particular one is a fraction of the tier rate, unless the game is running a promotion that guarantees otherwise.
Some titles include a mechanism that guarantees a result after a stated number of unsuccessful draws. Where one exists, it puts a ceiling on the worst case, and finding that number turns an open-ended average into a bounded figure. Where none exists, there is no ceiling, and a budget decided in advance is the only thing that provides one.
The budget worksheet
Fill this in from the shop before deciding anything. It takes a few minutes and it is the whole of the exercise.
| What to find | Where it is | Your figure |
|---|---|---|
| Smallest bundle: price and units | Shop, currency tab | AUD — / — units |
| Cost per unit | Price divided by units | — cents |
| Cost of one draw, in units | Draw screen | — units |
| Real cost of one draw | Cost per unit times draw cost | AUD — |
| Published rate for the tier you want | Rates or information button on the draw screen | — per cent |
| Average draws for that tier | 100 divided by the rate | — draws |
| Average cost for that tier | Average draws times real cost per draw | AUD — |
| Guarantee after how many draws, if any | Rates or event description | — draws / none |
| Your monthly limit | Decided by you, in advance | AUD — |
The last row is the one that matters. A figure decided before the shop is opened behaves differently from a figure arrived at afterwards, and writing it down makes it something to check against rather than something to remember.
Your rights when you buy in Australia
A purchase inside a game is a consumer transaction, and the Australian Consumer Law reaches it. Under that law a business must not engage in misleading or deceptive conduct in trade, and consumer guarantees apply to goods and services supplied to consumers. The ACCC administers it together with state and territory consumer protection agencies and publishes guidance for consumers on what the guarantees cover and how to complain.
Two practical points follow. Keep the receipts — store purchases generate an email and a record in the platform’s account, and a dispute is much simpler with them. And raise a problem with the seller first, in writing, before escalating; the ACCC’s material sets out where individual complaints go in each state and territory. Where a purchase was made by someone else on a shared computer, the family and age checklist covers the payment controls that prevent a repeat.
What to watch out for
Patterns that make cost hard to track
- Bundles sized so that a residue is always left over. The leftover balance is what makes the next purchase feel small.
- Offers presented with a timer. Recurring offers reappear; urgency is a prompt to decide quickly rather than a reason to.
- Comparing a bundle only against the bundle beside it. The comparison that matters is against the smallest one, and against your monthly figure.
- Treating an average as a price. An average across many draws is not what the next draw will cost.
- A stored payment method plus one-tap purchasing. Convenient by design, and the combination behind most unintended charges.
- Buying during an event because the event is ending. Events in this genre recur on a schedule.
The title advertised here
Raid: Shadow Legends is the game this site is paid to link to. Its publisher’s description covers the Champions, the dungeons, the Clan Boss fights and the fully-voiced campaign across twelve locations. It does not state what the game costs, what its shop contains, what its draw rates are, or whether any guarantee mechanism exists — so this page asserts none of those. Those figures are in the game’s own shop and rate screens, and the worksheet above is designed to be filled in from them.
Paid link. ITmatters s.r.o. is paid a fixed fee by the game’s affiliate programme if you register and start the tutorial after following it. You are charged nothing, and the fee does not depend on you spending anything.
Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends websiteSources
The Australian Consumer Law, including consumer guarantees and the prohibition on misleading or deceptive conduct in trade, is administered by the ACCC with state and territory consumer protection agencies, which publish the consumer guidance referred to above. All prices, rates and bundle sizes on this page are invented for the worked example and describe no actual title. Last reviewed 16 September 2026.