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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.
when it's paypal
Those guys are a law unto themselves, and their dispute resolution system adds new meaning to the word opaque.
I've had money removed from my account several years back (about £80) and spent 3 months on the phone trying to get it back, granted 2 of those months were talking to my bank (natwest) after being stonewalled by paypal, natwest decided at the end of 3 months to tell me they had no record of me ever making a complaint and that I would need to go to the police.
I swore off ever using paypal again But here I am, 3 years or so later with a paypal account I use regularly. Not having one is just far too much of a hindrance when it comes to things like using ebay, and paying for minecraft.
If paypal decides that there has been some "funny buisness" involved shouldnt they return the money to the origional accounts.
Why does electronic fund transfer have to be so complicated?
With my bank I can hop online and pay anyone in the world any amount of money. Well, they seem to limit it to how much I currently have in my account, and if the person I wish to pay does not have a real address (No "221B Baker Street + 2i" allowed), I'll have to hand deliver it instead of getting them to post it for free, but there's little limitation there.
Oh, and did I mention that the whole thing doesn't cost me a cent?
Heck, the only thing it's missing is a few features like:
- The ability to transfer money anonymously (all the recipient would get would be a confirmation crypto hash or something, maybe something that I could reveal later in a court, but that they couldn't* pin on me)
- The ability to make a storefront so all of the fund transfer went through "Qubit's Quantum Quickymart"
- Better account management, and a way to group or tag business and bills vs. friends vs. impulse game purchases (The way GMail handles email is a good first shot at a UI)
The bank isn't making money when I transfer funds, but they don't care -- they're already making money on the stuff I have sitting in their coffers.
So why are we stuck with PayPal, which is pretty much a
- Shady
- Costly
- Annoying
- Duplicate service
??
Hopefully some bank (or series of banks) will make this happen for us. Moving money around shouldn't be anywhere near this complicated!
* Says the power of NP.
coding is life
A few more words about Google Checkout: works only in US.
I am using Paypal to sell a game. The demographics are USA 39%, UK 11%, Italy 8% and so on. Overall the 20-80 rule is observed.
By using Google Checkout instead of PayPal, I would have prevented 61% of my sales - you know, long tail and all. It's true that only 0.05% of the sales are from e.g. Maldives, but all these sales add up.
If Google Checkout gets global, I'll be the first to jump. Until then, Paypal is a simple method trusted by the buyers. I just make sure I don't keep my money there.
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.
Before you say "stop using PayPal and start using something else", what else are we supposed to use?
Google Checkout, for example, is only available in the USA and the UK.
Another thing about PayPal is that it's extremely simple to add to a website. All you need is a few lines of HTML and you have a shopping cart and payment system.
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.