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PayPal Withholding Indie Game Dev's €600,000 Account
epee1221 writes "Markus Persson, a.k.a. Notch, the developer of Minecraft, posted on his development blog today that PayPal limited his account with unspecified cause on August 25th. Since then, payments for the alpha version of Minecraft have continued accumulating while Notch has been unable to withdraw them, and the account now contains over €600,000. PayPal recently told him it may take up to two more weeks for things to get sorted out and that if they conclude that there is funny business involved, they will keep the money."
This unfortunate news followed an announcement a few days ago that he and a friend would be starting a studio of their own to continue development on Minecraft and start working on a new project.
Almost exactly five years ago, Paypal froze $30k in Hurricane Katrina charity money raised by SomethingAwful, the story is here. They're still crooks now.
Google Checkout
PayPal is infamous for this.
Years ago, when I pulled my account information from them it was "common" knowledge in the eBay scene that if you were a seller and a buyer claimed it was a fraudulent sale, PayPal would pull the refund directly from your PayPal account without notice. If the funds were not in your PayPal account, they would pull it from your linked checking account, again, without notice.
The common strategy was to setup a second "dummy" checking account and link PayPal to that one. Whenever you had money in your PayPal account above a certain amount, pull it into your "dummy" account and then transfer the full balance _out_ of that account into one that isn't linked to PayPal.
Why someone would trust PayPal, who isn't a bank, with well over half a million dollars is beyond me.
For some interesting stories, paypalsucks.com
PayPal power results from 2 factors. Terrible bank bank transfer opportunities for individuals domestically, and even more expensive ones internationally. In many European countries nobody uses Paypal for transactions. It's either direct bank transfer (many banks offer no-fee transfers to other banks), bank-based payment system or credit cards. Yet in the US (a HUGE consumer market) those options are limited to credit cards, and check / ACH system and PayPal fills that niche just perfectly. It's changing, i.e. SunTrust recently introduced cheap on-line wire-transfers for only $3 / transfer - a big upgrade, as it used to be $25. Yet for some reason, the interbanking system in the US is still far behind what Europe has to offer (except for credit cards - there are definitely more developed here!)
Just use temporary credit card numbers.
Citi Cards has one, so does Discover.
1 time use numbers. Discovers expire the same month as your normal card.
Citi Card's expire the next calendar month and you can even set a limit. I couldn't imagine using anything else.
Sixty thousand people have bought the game since May 2009, not in the last two weeks.
I bought the game a couple of months ago and every other game in my collection had been neglected.
The basic gist of it is that the entire world is generated from cubes on the fly. You explore, chop down trees, make tools, mine for minerals and stone, build houses/castles/towers/ridiculous pixel art sculptures and watch out for monsters which inhabit the world at night and dark corners of your mines and naturally-occuring caves. The world is generated on the fly as you explore, with mountains, rivers, forests, caves and the occasional treasure room. Multiplayer is in the early stages right now, but fun. Single player is an amazing time waster, it's so easy to get completely sucked into a world made up of giant pixels.
It's one of the best indie games I've ever tried and it's made by just one guy.
Eat the rich.
Actually, sixty thousand people have paid for it just since the account was frozen!
Minecraft is an entirely new category of game. There is no name for this new category. This is why indie development rocks; EA is happy to release new iterations of the FPS, but they would never gamble with a new class of game entirely.
The basic idea of Minecraft is this: you find yourself in a randomly-generated 3D world. It's daytime. At night, monsters will pop out of the darkness and attack you. Your only hope of survival is to harvest resources from the world (wood, stone, etc.) and build a shelter and weapons to defend yourself. The night/day cycle repeats: harvest, build, defend.
Think of it as something of a combo of Elder Scrolls and Second Life.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Here, let me type 9 characters into YouTube for you. ... Though, looking at your name, I suppose I have the answer.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Minecraft&page=&utm_source=opensearch
Bam! Watch. Be educated. Or shit, look at Wikipedia. It can explain it too. It's amazingly popular among other Internet forums (Something Awful, LueLinks, part of 4chan), as even though it's an alpha, it's been fully playable for months. So, you know. Multiplayer games that let you goof off and hang out with people make money. SHOCK.
I'm not sure if you're lazy, stupid, or a troll. But your post is calling the guy out on tricking people, when there's an easy to find product there.
Valve blogged about it, which is what drove a big chunk of those sales.
The game is basically first-person Dwarf Fortress. Your job is mine riches out of the ground while not dying.
If the credit card was stolen, then the loss should come out of the credit company's pocket, not Paypal or the Ebay seller. PLUS paypal is supposed to provide seller protection if the item was shipped to a verified address.
If it were me I'd track down the buyer and demand back whatever product he stole. You have the address.
ALSO: Those comments that say Paypal is not regulated are flat wrong. There are numerous regulations/laws that cover Paypal, and it was their violations of those laws that got them into trouble with multiple American States several years ago. The judge in the case nullified huge sections of Paypal's EULA as being contrary to these laws. ("Consumers cannot sign-away their rights already protected by state and/or federal law.")
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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
ALSO: Those comments that say Paypal is not regulated are flat wrong. ALSO: Those comments that say Paypal is not regulated are flat wrong.
*NOBODY* is saying that PayPal is not subject to laws. What they are saying is they aren't regulated like a bank, where you can have some reasonable level of confidence that your money is safe.
I'm going to use this as an opportunity to plug BrainTree -- my new employer uses them as our payment gateway, and they're a dream to work with: They provide well-written APIs for all common platforms, and when I have a problem I get an email back from a member of their dev team typically in about 30 minutes.
Their front page says "We [heart] developers", and AFAICT they mean it. Github is one of their marquee customers.
Taking credit cards doesn't need to be awful.
That being said, you are wrong on so many levels:
Nice try, but no, it's not. You may wish to actually bother to read the agreement you signed when you opened that account. Universally, you will find a clause that says "At all times, any cards issued attached to account remain the property of [issuing institution] and must be returned upon demand."
If anything, you mean the responsibility. I don't think you'll find many rights to using a card. You could authorize additional users, but when you let someone else use your card, you'd be forfeiting any and all protections against liability stemming from the use of said card.
Again, it's a basic tenet of human maturity and responsibility that we read and comprehend the contracts we enter into. However, evidently, many of us choose not to, and wax indignant and polemic, ignorant of our ignorance. In your cardholder contract, the one you signed, if not also on the card itself, you'll find a clause, "This card is valid ONLY UPON the signature of the cardholder.". In many cases, this emphasis is explicit. Many contracts / institutions will also state that you are not to write CHECK ID on the card.
That same contract will also state that your issuing institution, and the merchants in its network reserve the right to seize and retain possession of your card, and that the merchant may destroy the card on instruction from the institution. Remember, it's not your property?
Now, why, may you ask, would they accept a signature on the back of your card, and not "CHECK ID"? Several reasons: 1) what makes you think your average merchant is trained in recognizing counterfeit ID or verifying identity from facial features? (Not that they are expected to be graphologists either, but that's another matter). 2) Some people like to believe that having such a request on their card raises the bar of liability and / or protection for them from fraudulent claims - "Did they check my ID?" - when in fact it does no such thing, after all your issuing institution made no such agreement with you, and in fact you went outside the bounds of your agreement to impart an obligation on your relationship between you and your merchant that has no bearing, weight or merit.
Don't even bother referring to card-not-present transactions. The merchant pays a higher fee on such transactions, precisely because of the increased risk.
Don't get your panties all twisted up because someone on the Internet has the unmitigated gall to suggest you actually read the contracts you enter into before mouthing off petulantly.