How Google nearly destroyed our indie company

As some of you probably noticed, Stepcraft has been having payment issues for anyone using Google in-app purchases. In this blog post, we want to give some insights into what happened behind the scenes, as it has had quite some impact.

What caused it

The move

In August, we moved to a small office. It's been awesome having a space that the three of us can use to focus, work together, discuss features, whatever we want to do that day.

With this, we changed our business address to this new office. This has to go through a bunch of official channels, and we need to update our address with any company we do business with.

When updating our address in our Google Play account, the problems started. Here we can't just type our new address and be done. Google uses an external database (DUNS) to fetch our address. After a few days our address was synced to DUNS, but Google was still getting the old address. We contacted Google to get some help updating our address.

The verification

After asking for help, we were suddenly asked to verify our identity. This is probably a routine thing, that just happened to be at an unfortunate moment. Next to our personal identification, we had to prove that our company was registered at the address that Google has. The old one, that we had been trying to update for 2 weeks already.

We notified Google about this, and asked them if we should prove that we were registerd at our previous address, or wait for them to update our address. They told us to wait, so we did. In the meantime, Google held any funds in our account, until the verification was complete.

The payment block

Fast-forward 2 months, and we were still in exactly the same situation. We had asked for updates a handful times at this point, but gotten no further.

Then, out of nowhere, users started reporting that their payments are failing with some weird error codes. It seemed that because the identity verification is still pending, Google decided to block payments in our app completely. We didn't get any kind of warning that this might happen, and not even a message that they would now start blocking payments. Our users is how we found out.

We sent countless emails, but got no help at all from Google. As of writing, it has been 32 days since we last got a response from Google at all.

We reached out to several friends and ex-colleagues at Google, to see if they could help us get to the right people. But with such a big organization, it was incredibly difficult for them to find where to even go.

We really exhausted all options for contacting and escalating Google, but were met with silence.

How we solved it

We moved back to our previous address. It's crazy to write this down. We had to re-lease the previous address, officially update our business address again, along with all the paperwork and cost that involves. But it was somehow easier than getting Google to update our office address. We were lucky that it was even possible to lease the previous address again at all.

What this means for you

If you've subscribed through Google, you may have gotten emails about failing payments. The next time these payments are tried they should work.

Closing words

This whole experience really highlighted how much we, and so many other developers out there, are dependent on big companies like Google and Apple. As a consumer, it is easier to contact Google and get support than it is as developer. At the same time, there are many restrictions on offering other payment methods in your app, or even linking to an external payment option. Recent court cases have achieved slightly more freedom for developers to allow other payment methods, but this is only in some countries, and still quite restrictive.

We will continue putting our heart and soul into Stepcraft. The three of us are working days, nights and weekends on Stepcraft. It's our dream that we can keep doing that long-term. Everyone who has supported us or keeps supporting us helps make that happen. To anyone who has supported us, a really big thank you.

Ready to turn your walks into adventures? Sign up for Stepcraft's Closed Alpha today and transform your daily movement into epic fantasy quests. Your character is waiting, and the world is ready to be explored.