Pay"Pal" and Crowdsourced Games Development

G

Grall

Invisible Member
Legend
You have probably heard a couple stories by now about paypal locking down various developers' accounts, essentially stealing their money and holding it hostage, in some cases seemingly indefinitely, or until after the game has been finished - money intended to FUND the actual development of the game; a completely crazy catch-22 situation! In a few cases, paypal has arbitrarily assigned itself the role as producer overwatch, to ensure said developers 'spend their (own!) money wisely and stuff'.

Here's a long write-up of what this disgusting company has been up to of late: http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/crowdfunding-s-secret-enemy-is-paypal/1100-4743/

So, what can we do against this monstrous, faceless, conscience-free, soul-less entity? Only thing we can do. Not do business with them, because money talks, and it's the only language greedy shitbag corporations like paypal understands.
 
Did Kickstarter switch who they were using for their payment processor? When I did my Kickstarter on Wasteland 2 last year, my payment was processed by Amazon.com which doesn't accept Paypal.

And to add to this. The company that is making the Ouya is also doing the same thing with freezing funds for any developer they suspect of trying to scam consumer's via Kickstarter + their offer to match Kickstarter funds.

[edit] Oh wait, this is for Indiegogo and not Kickstarter. Never even looked at Indiegogo before. I'm wondering if Indiegogo are behind this similar to the Ouya situation. And if it isn't Indiegogo asking Paypal to manage the situation, then I'd hope that Indiegogo would switch to Amazon.com for payment processing as I haven't read of any problems with that which weren't obviously scams.

Myself, I won't be boycotting Paypal. In fact, Paypal just saved my g/f ~100 USD in restocking fee's due to having to return a mobile phone that was advertised by a internet retailer as 3G for a certain carrier, but wasn't 3G for that carrier (verified with the carrier after she wasn't able to connect at 3G). She had to go through Paypal arbitration as the retailer refused to waive the restocking fee, even though it was their false advertising that caused the problem in the first place.

Regards,
SB
 
I won't be boycotting Paypal either. I recently ordered a product online from China using Paypal..never received the product after one whole month, contacted the seller and they kept making excuses so I filed a non-receipt claim. Couple weeks later I receive package so I closed the case. Apparently the seller never sent out the package from the original order. Only after filing the claim did the seller send out the package.
 
Slightly OT but worth noting anyway. I used to use Paypal for accepting overseas payments until I found http://transferwise.com/

If anyone else is exporting, I recommend trying them out and skipping Paypal's 2% cut on top of the exchange rate.
 
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