Meanwhile, the first builds of Minecraft were so popular that Notch got their paypal locked for suspicious activity with so much money coming in...
Not really the same signs of success ahah
There was also a period where PayPal would tell people that your account has been locked pending money laundering checks. Which made you sound really dodgy. It was a regulatory thing that was mandatory over a certain amount. Not sure if it overlapped with when this happend but it's pretty close.
I mean the game blew up, and he was selling it without a registered company. By the time they locked his account it had almost a million dollars on it. Same circumstances today, and paypal would do the same I reckon. The assets were unfrozen later from what I understand.
The locking the account was never the problem the handling was the problem.
They are legally required to do the money laundering checks.
There's many ways they could have improved this. Suddenly locking your account without warning and emailing all your customers that your account is under investigation is the worst possible way to handle it.
Maybe i'm being judgemental but I think you just aged yourself; the early days of PayPal were a nightmare and I know several people that had their businesses ruined after they froze funds in CONNECTED bank accounts, not the paypal funds, the funds in the bank simply connected to paypal for absolutely no wrong-doing.
Don't trust me; go look it up and realise how insane it is that this company was allowed to continue.
They also have one of the most intense tracking cookies out there.
Honestly no clue, I’m not well versed in paypal TOS and what they legally can and cannot get away with. But he was obviously not breaking any laws so common sense would argue that paypal has no legal right to permanently seize the funds.
the very first builds were free, I'm assuming that was for when he actually started selling the game (unless he was taking pre-orders/donations, I actually don't know about those), and Minecraft was way cheaper when it first started being sold than it is now! That really is a different sign of success lol
Alpha 5€, beta 10€, release 20€, then $20
As in, Mojang put the $ slightly higher originally, then microsoft raised the € price to 25 to "fix a price disparity"
I don't get why you were donvoted, this is exactly the truth, they even made the worse bedrock edition even more expensive on consoles at 30€ despite Minecraft being one of the most sold games of all time and then even added fuckass microtransactions to it, greed is the one thing Microslop is good at.
from what I can read in the wiki the first versions to be paid were the Alpha ones but it was really cheap and has slowly increased over time, so previous versions (classic, indev, infdev, survival test, multiplayer test) were free
Ah yeah cool, I can't remember whether I played Alpha or Beta first, I do vaguely remember paying a small amount for it.
Some fun times! Tools where you could just drop them and pick them up to restore full health. Absolutely bugged out mine carts. We had a server of about or 6 of us building random shit.
Paypal is literally a trash payment service, i've seen so many small merchants wait months before they unlocked their money, some never got their money back.
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u/laplongejr 2d ago
Meanwhile, the first builds of Minecraft were so popular that Notch got their paypal locked for suspicious activity with so much money coming in... Not really the same signs of success ahah