"west: place with creative smart people. rest: dumb idiot consumers"
This is what always happen with 'gaming marketplaces', and 'mobile marketplaces'. This is the case with XNA, X-Box Live, android market etc...
As someone from Hungary (Eastern Europe) I was naive enough to get excited about some of these in the past. I no longer do that. My first task is to check for this 'west-rest' rule. If I smell this I avoid the stuff like plague.
Maybe a good startup idea for someone who is reading this: create non-protectionist gaming marketplaces? I think there would be huge demand for that.
No need to go looking for conspiracy theories. The reason they don't do this is simple: It's hard.
Look around at the plethora of ways to accept payment and send money online. Dozens of them, right? How many of them allow payouts to non-US citizens? One.
PayPal, that's it. That's the only company that's managed to even partially solve the horrible problem of how to put money into a non-US bank account and not immediately go out of business due to fraud. They solved this because solving fraud issues is the only thing they do. And it took them a long time. And still they can't figure out how to do it for over half the countries in the world.
Google doesn't hate Hungarians. They just don't know how to send you money. Try not to hold it against them.
I don't understand why paying me money is a problem, and I don't get it what kind of fraud are we speaking about.
Normally the following should happen:
1.I create an account on their site with my username and password. I log in with this account.
2. I upload the contents (game).
3. Logged in with this account I could:
a.: specify my PayPal account to thich I expect the money to be transfered.
b.: specify my international bank account number (SWIFT code)
How can be there fraud? If I specify someone else's bank account number then only I can lose on that. I cannot imagine how could I do any 'fraud'. This is beyond me.
Edit: It is quite absurd. We have a global economy in which it is easy for the money to flow in one direction but very hard (or sometimes impossible) to flow in the other.
Stealing credit card numbers, creating accounts with those CC#s, and using purchases to drain them into your account is the first thing that comes to mind, though it's probably only one possibility.
No, the idea is you use stolen credit cards to buy your own game, then you get the money from the credit cards to yourself perhaps easier than other ways. I'm not sure.
Heh, consider yourself lucky, in Costa Rica you can't even buy from the Android Market, or Amazon mp3 store. Hell, I had to use a US vpn just to be able to buy my phone.
I know it's probably a negligible piece of market share but it sucks to feel excluded.
There are also legal ramifications when doing business in a new country.
They (Google, in this case) have to ensure that they are complying with appropriate company/tax/accounting/privacy/etc. laws for each country. This may not be as easy as rubber-stamping some forms, so they have to prioritise countries they are familiar with and are can already do business in.
Google hasn't even managed to accept Canadian developers into the Android marketplace, despite having multiple operations there - they either aren't trying very hard, or they are just really, astonishingly bad at this stuff.
I think the problem is when cross border fraud happens, the complexity and cost for detective work is higher than domestic fraud. Also in case of regular refund for customers, it is much easier for Market institution to deduct fund from domestic sellers' accounts. While cross border market has to deal with tax, exchange rate and different countries law regarding for refund.
As developer friendly Google generally is, i find this kind of attitude very annoying. The fact that the android marketplace is closed to lots of countries even two years (!!) after launch certainly tames any optimistic posture one might take regarding Google's attitude towards rest of the world developers.
How possible/easy it is for someone in the EU to register a company in the US (with a US bank account) without being a US resident?
EDIT: A cursory search on google indicates it's possible, but it seems like a field rife with scams. Any advice from someone who has done it before would be highly appreciated.
"USD only for App developers, WWW for buyers"
I translate it to myself:
"west: place with creative smart people. rest: dumb idiot consumers"
This is what always happen with 'gaming marketplaces', and 'mobile marketplaces'. This is the case with XNA, X-Box Live, android market etc... As someone from Hungary (Eastern Europe) I was naive enough to get excited about some of these in the past. I no longer do that. My first task is to check for this 'west-rest' rule. If I smell this I avoid the stuff like plague.
Maybe a good startup idea for someone who is reading this: create non-protectionist gaming marketplaces? I think there would be huge demand for that.