Pre-order Support

[medierra]

Originally Posted by Schnitzl

hi, we tried to reproduce the problem and this time it worked!
I hope my 48$ will help, thanks for your support

It certainly will, thank you very much for supporting the game!

[Ian]

Originally Posted by matthewfarmery

I used my debit card without issues, once the CV2 field was added, it processes fine, but paypal doesn't allow their service to be used for games that are in alpha / beta state, only when the game is pretty near finished, its a shame, but no way around it, but anyway, debit cards work fine, so if you have one, you should use it, or a credit card, but Im not a big fan of credit cards

As far as Paypal goes you are Wrong my friend - if paypal doesn't allow games in Alpha/beta status then how do you explain Minecraft ?
Minecraft was in Alpha for ages and paypal was used all the way through

[wsensor]

It's probably because no one bothered to report / complain about it to paypal.
But here is a game that some random people probably saw it and reported it just to cause problems for the company.

It happens on a lot of site (like sites asking for donations to help with bandwidth and other things. Sometimes these sites get their paypal removed for some stupid reason all because someone went and found something wrong with the site.)

[matthewfarmery]

I was wondering about minecraft, as by right, paypal shouldn't have been used, but as Ian has said, its possibly no one has bothered to report it to paypal, but in the case of impulse, if they allow gamers to beta test games, then no papypal there, only credit card / debit, and one or two other services,

but regards to minecraft, it may have its paypal payment system removed still, especially if people complain, and more people asking, why is minecraft supporting paypal, when other places aren't, Im pretty sure, its in paypal's TOS, but I fully read that yet. but by rights, paypal should not be used to buy minecraft at that stage of development

[Renevent]

Probably because minecraft you can download and play the game after paying for it. The devs can call it whatever they want...alpha...beta...it doesn't matter as you get the product when you make the purchase.

[medierra]

I haven't said much specific about our ordeal with PayPal since I had held out hope that we could work out an agreement with them but it doesn't look like that is going to happen, so I figure I might as well share our experience to clear up confusion about the issue and perhaps benefit other people / companies.

PayPal seems to be rather inconsistent in the way they deal with different companies and in the information they provide about what is or is not acceptable. I know of a couple companies who have used PayPal during alpha, beta, and even for pre-orders significantly in advance of releasing anything, similar to us, without incident. However, very shortly after we began using PayPal for pre-orders they froze our account due to "suspicious activity". Apparently making money is suspicious. When we inquired about it they said they would do a review of the account and determine a course of action. The result of the review was that they felt our business model was too risky, closed our account, and held our funds for 6 months.

Why was our account reviewed in the first place? I can't say for certain but I don't think it was the result of anyone reporting us. We've never had an unhappy customer to my knowledge. I think their system just automatically flags accounts for review based on certain activity like volume of transactions or when you attempt to increase the limits on how much money you can transfer out of your PayPal account per month. Our sales volume had suddenly spiked during the end of Jan / early Feb and we were doing quite a lot of pre-orders for a couple days until they froze our account. At that same time I applied to raise our transfer limit since it starts our at something ridiculously low like $500 / month, so maybe that triggered it. They make it very easy to get started using PayPal and then, once you're already using their service and generating a significant revenue, they decide whether they like your business or not.

At the time of the review, their stated issue was that they do not support the pre-sale of an item more than 20 days from shipping and that they believed our business model posed too great a risk for charge-backs. I said that I didn't understand what the risk was given that our pre-order, at that time, was quite clearly presented as a means of contributing to the project. A PayPal representative said that he believed people either wouldn't read that or wouldn't understand it and then would be upset when they didn't receive a finished, playable game soon after their purchase.

There was a similar story about the Minecraft developer, Markus Persson's funds being frozen by PayPal as well but I think he was finally able to work out some sort of deal with them perhaps due to the publicity he got over the matter. I think his circumstances may have also been somewhat different since he did have a playable alpha available for people at the time.

Whatever the case, I recently attempted to talk with PayPal again since they finally released our funds and we've never had a single charge-back in all this time. I thought with that spotless record, they might be willing to work out some sort of deal with us perhaps where they held a certain percentage of our funds in reserve to further mitigate the charge-back risk.

As is evidenced by the fact that we still cannot accept payment through PayPal, that conversation, unfortunately, did not go well. They said our business model is too high risk for them because we do not ship a physical product to people that PayPal can verify through postal tracking when claims arise. I brought up the fact that other companies engage in the sale of virtual goods in exactly the same manner using PayPal, at which point she said they could investigate those companies if I wanted. I obviously declined not wanting anyone else to feel the wrath of PayPal. I then pursued a different approach asking what we could do to change our business model to make it more amenable to PayPal. I was told there was nothing we could do. I even suggested we could start shipping a physical product to people. I got the same answer, there was nothing we could do. I didn't understand that since I felt like we had only ever been engaged in fair and honest business and were willing to make significant changes to appease them. After a little more back and forth, I finally got to the bottom of it - the representative told me once they made the decision to close an account, it was their company policy to never reinstate it.

So, while engaging in honest business with fans who want to support our game, following a model similar to other small companies we know that use PayPal, our account was closed and we are now permanently banned from ever using PayPal for all time.

My intention is not to discourage other people / businesses from using PayPal but merely to suggest that they should make the decision with open eyes and carefully consider how and when, in the course of their business, to use the service. As we have discovered, even with the best intentions, it isn't difficult to end up on the wrong side of PayPal and suffer irrevocable consequences. I think the best suggestion is to not use the PayPal for pre-orders and at least wait until you have an alpha to give people.

Uhh yeah, so we're exploring other payment options. We think we've found a suitable alternative but I've just been so busy with development that I haven't had time to take the next step. We'll have other forms of payment up before we go alpha though.

[DragonWolf]

wow, just wow...

how lame is that? Clearly they need to revise how they handle things. They're like skittish mice, any sudden moves and they bolt down their holes.
*sigh* Well, I hope this alternitive works out for you guys. Good luck with that.

also you should probibly post that little post of your in its own topic and stick it in announcments or something for new people to read and understand why you won't be using paypal.

[hooby]

Typical case of political decisions made by some higher-ups who have absolutely no clue about their customer base?

[nugar]

I pre-paid for a game called Inquisitor, from games.cinemax.cz in Czechoslovakia, must be nearly 6 months ago now and I paid for that using Paypal with no worries in the world. Maybe if enough of us gamers put the squeeze on Paypal the might do a deal. Why not set it up as a Donation then and not as prepaid, Paypal don't seem to have any issues with that as far as I can tell.

[matthewfarmery]

Originally Posted by nugar

I pre-paid for a game called Inquisitor, from games.cinemax.cz in Czechoslovakia, must be nearly 6 months ago now and I paid for that using Paypal with no worries in the world. Maybe if enough of us gamers put the squeeze on Paypal the might do a deal. Why not set it up as a Donation then and not as prepaid, Paypal don't seem to have any issues with that as far as I can tell.

I think if enough people contact paypal and and tell them that people ARE willing to donate and support a game, then they (paypal) shouldn't stop that at all. Sounds to me, they don't want to really support small independent companies a lot of the time, I know when I pre ordered (helped to test Sins of the solar empire) that paypal wasn't allowed, until the game was final

but in the case of Crate, I think the way that paypal has treated the company, is very unfair, and thank you medierra for sharing this, but I really think paypal should change their minds, just looking on how to contact them, seems using a feedback form is one way, I may email them and tell them they need to change their minds over this matter, I also think if Crate had no one asking for money back, that should have told them something, I also think they need to support small companies better, anyway, I think I will write up a suitable complaint message and one should be hitting their inbox in a bit, if more do the same, then maybe we could get paypal to change their minds. So I hope more will do the same, I think paypal should be made available if the game does hit alpha or beta or if the game hits final, anyway going to write up a complaint letter and post back what paypal says

so the more that do this, the better the chance of paypal changing their minds

Edit

OK, I have used their contact us, / email form, and gave them a fairly lengthy letter of complaint regarding their treatment of Crate Entertainment, so hopefully I have started the ball rolling, anyone who feels as strongly as me, I suggest you do the same, hopefully if enough do this, then they may change their minds, and I really hope they do

edit 2

I would suggest if you do email them, you do the letter in a a word processor in case you have time out issues with their their form if you type it direct, I know sometimes forms have time limits for how long it will keep the connection open, so if you do submit, it may not always work and pressing back on your browser and you may end up losing what you have wrote