PayPal Freezes $750K in MineCraft Dev's Account

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
45,698
1
0
PayPal Freezes $750K in MineCraft Dev's Account


The creator of MineCraft [http://www.minecraft.net/] has run into a bit of a snag with PayPal, which has frozen his account with over $763,000 in it and refuses to let him touch it.

Because it's a struggle for me to scrape together 750 bucks, much less 750 thousand, I can't really imagine how much it would suck to have it but not be able to get at it. So I'll let MineCraft creator Markus Persson describe the situation in his own words.

"blog [http[://www.paypal.com]. "My account is still limited. I've called them three times, they keep telling me it's being reviewed. Most recently they told me it'd take up to two more weeks for it to get resolved, and that if they decide something bad's being going on, they're going to keep the money. There's over 600000 euro in there. Money I was planning on investing in the new company."

In response to people suggesting that it's somehow his own fault for letting all that money build up in a PayPal account, Persson noted that he actually clears out his account every week. "They limited my account just as sales started spiking, so this money has accumulated since they limited the account," he said.

One obvious question emerges from Persson's ongoing troubles with PayPal: How the hell does one guy rack up more than three quarters of a million dollars off a single indie game? My first thought was that it had to be a typo, but apparently MineCraft is just a really good game. As one commenter on Slashdot [http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/09/10/1713217/PayPal-Withholding-Indie-Game-Devs-euro600000-Account?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2FslashdotGames+%28Slashdot%3A+Games%29] noted, "I bought the game a couple of months ago and every other game in my collection had been neglected... 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."

Persson said he's sure he'll get things sorted out, but described the situation as "kind of frustrating" in the meantime. Hopefully he'll have better luck than Something Awful did during its 2005 run-in [http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/paypal-fiasco-summary.php] with PayPal: After raising over $30,000 in nine hours to aid Red Cross efforts following Hurricane Katrina, SA's PayPal account was frozen for suspicious activity, ultimately resulting in all donated funds, minus service fees, being returned to donators.


Permalink
 

FloodOne

New member
Apr 29, 2009
455
0
0
What a joke. There needs to be some sort of business edition of paypal. Hopefully the government steps in and gives the money to it's rightful owner.
 

Altorin

Jack of No Trades
May 16, 2008
6,976
0
0
why in all holy hell would you keep 750,000 dollars in your paypal.
 

silver wolf009

[[NULL]]
Jan 23, 2010
3,432
0
0
Those untrust worhy swine... burn them!!

Seriously though, nothing sucks more than having money and not being able to use it. I, as someone who plays minecraft and someone who I has any amount of humility, really hope that he gets his money back.
 

Cpt. Red

New member
Jul 24, 2008
531
0
0
"600592 registered users, of which 133537 (22.23%) have bought the game." And the price have been ?9.95 so that's a total of ?1328693.15... A bit more then 750k...

EDIT: As a response to
Andy Chalk said:
One obvious question emerges from Persson's ongoing troubles with PayPal: How the hell does one guy rack up more than three quarters of a million dollars off a single indie game? My first thought was that it had to be a typo, but apparently MineCraft is just a really good game.
 

Shihoudani

New member
Oct 3, 2009
121
0
0
I really can't believe PayPal continues to use these sketchy business practices. This isn't the first time we've heard of PayPal pulling this on people.

I haven't bought Minecraft, though I have been wondering if I should. The free to play demo is pretty fun.
 

A Pious Cultist

New member
Jul 4, 2009
1,103
0
0
I'm honestly suprised he hasnt got his own purchasing interface up at this point, stuff that's far smaller in scale have them but this huge phenomena is still going through Paypal?
 

Aenir

New member
Mar 26, 2009
437
0
0
Fuck PayPal, they think everyone is a criminal. Shit like this is just stupid. They rejected money raised for fucking KATRINA? My god...

Altorin said:
why in all holy hell would you keep 750,000 dollars in your paypal.
Read the article: "In response to people suggesting that it's somehow his own fault for letting all that money build up in a PayPal account, Persson noted that he actually clears out his account every week. "They limited my account just as sales started spiking, so this money has accumulated since they limited the account," he said."
 

hecticpicnic

New member
Jul 27, 2010
465
0
0
paypal do this kind of thing alot e.g. my father opened a paypal account for my mother and put in 200 euro on her birthday and they froze both my mothers and my fathers(he had over a grand in there) account because they had the same address ,they were very vague about it , it was something to do with betting fraud or they can't track you or whatever and it took like a year took work it out, and they closer my mothers account
 

Celtic_Kerr

New member
May 21, 2010
2,166
0
0
FloodOne said:
What a joke. There needs to be some sort of business edition of paypal. Hopefully the government steps in and gives the money to it's rightful owner.
American Government, won't do shit.

I work for this industry, I understand how it works and a massive spike of sales like this WOULD look incredibly suspicious. I can't doubt Pay Pal's investigation, but the dev SHOULD be getting his money back. Almost guaranteed. They're most running through transactions and matching them up.

The only reason this is so appalling is because of the amount. I have small time business owners gettingh $8000 frozen and THEY freak out.
 

Imsety

New member
Oct 26, 2009
62
0
0
Goddammit, they better not have my ten bucks in there. I paid to support an indie developer like myself, not to line the pockets of that giant multinational bastard of a corporation.

Also, Minecraft is awesome and addictive. Luckily getting killed by a huge mob of skeletons has dissuaded me from playing for a while, otherwise I wouldn't get any work done at all...
 

rembrandtqeinstein

New member
Sep 4, 2009
2,173
0
0
Awesome!...I'm buying that tonight if I can get the demo to work with a gamepad on my htpc.

Publishers take note: games like this prove we don't need photorealistic grass and martin sheen's voice to make a good game.
 

SometingStupid

New member
Dec 6, 2009
8
0
0
Well I guess that's just what happens when somebody exposes your game to over 1.2 Million people, one of those being SeaNanners, who may be the most sub'd YouTube Commentator. Who then also exposed the game to all of his subs.

Surely PayPal could just Google this one.

And yes, it's definatley worth the buy. Single Player is borderline epic and the MultiPlayer has barely been touched yet.
 

Toycat

New member
Nov 9, 2009
10
0
0
Actually, either way the money is his again in 6 months (paypal freeze rules means he gets it either way, he just has to wait 6 months)

However, thats not intersting news.... :p
 

GiantRedButton

New member
Mar 30, 2009
599
0
0
The source is rock paper shotgun i assume?
Great game to get creative btw, had a free 2 play option but i dont know if thats still available.
 

Drops a Sweet Katana

Folded 1000x for her pleasure
May 27, 2009
897
0
0
Altorin said:
why in all holy hell would you keep 750,000 dollars in your paypal.
Didn't read the whole article? It said why. PayPal froze his account when he STARTED to make that money. And plus it froze a few weeks ago and the money's just been accumulating since, not to mention the game has become insanely popular over the last few months.