For Red Thread Games, the longest journey may be getting in touch with PayPal customer service.
A few days ago Ars Technica ran a really interesting story on a little crowdfunding project called Mailpile which had its crowdfunding money frozen by PayPal. “The idea of crowdfunding is relatively new, and…Paypal has to manage the risk model and also the regulatory and compliance issues in every market in which we operate,” Anuj Nayar, Paypal’s Senior Director of Global Initiatives, told Ars.
It’s actually a complicated issue, and I can sympathize with PayPal here when it comes to setting up clear guidelines. How they’re going about handling it, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. Today, just four days after the Mailpile story, video game developer Red Thread Games tweeted that the PayPal funds for their crowdfunded gameDreamfall Chapters have been frozen, noting that “We keep hitting a wall when we try to contact @PayPal customer service.” This is a game that raised over $1.5M on Kickstarter. The good news is that Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments rather than PayPal, so the bulk of the game’s funding remains in the hands of the creators. And this is just the latest news, which comes on the heels of a similar freeze on the account of Nyu Media, the publisher of Yatagarasu Attack on Cataclysm,a 2D fighting game crowdfunded through IndieGogo.indiegogo marketing The email from PayPal advises us that they have ‘reserved’ the funding and will release ‘up to 50% of the funds’ before Yatagarasu AoC is released and the rest only after they have verified copies of paid invoices. What’s more, they provide no option to discuss, stating we should ‘contact us closer to the release date beginning of next year’ to arrange release of the funds.Nyu Media’s Seon King wrote yesterday:
After this was covered in a number of publications, PayPal reversed course, sending King another email advising him that the money had been released from “reserve” status. That was about five hours ago. WhenArs ran the Mailpile story, PayPal released the funds and tossed in their very own $1,000 donation.kickstarter marketing So this is apparently the way things are being handled at PayPal right now in regards to crowdfunding: Step one: Freeze funds on popular crowdfunding project. Step two: Wait until it goes viral on social media and press outlets begin covering it. Finally, step three: Notice the bad press and online backlash and release the funds. For one thing, PayPal should be contacting these companies over the phone rather than through an impersonal email. They should have real people handling these accounts and discussing their issues with the money in real time.
But until they can come up with clear policy, they should be working with these projects, not against them. Posted from :http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/09/10/paypal-freezes-crowdfunding-money-for-kickstarter-hit-dreamfall-chapters/ By David Khorram | www.CrowdFundingPlanning.com |