Credit? Money? HUH??

[EzEfoSurE]

Umm, i am juss starting developing games, and I have no experiance. I was wondering if there are any required permits or liscences invlived with selling independent video games? No?
Also, how do you guys get paid from online downloads? Do people send you checks? Money orders? Credit card numbers? How does you website collect the credit card numbers? etc. I wanted to kno if someone could give me a thorough explaination on how consumers pay for the downloads, and how the money they give gets into you bank, or your pockets. Thank you in advance

[svero]

It really depends where you live. Each country has it's own rules. In Canada for instance all you need to do is register a business name. But there may be advantages to setting up a corporation. It's not really specific to games. You need to read a book on how to set up a small business.

As for payments.. again there are many ways. Most people use registration services which do all the credit card handling and then send you a check every month which you deposit in your personal or business account. Most services also offer bank wire transfers for an additional fee. Some people will go through the trouble and get their own merchant account so they can process credit cards themselves. The fees are lower but there are extra hassles like the application itself, and having to have several merchant accounts for different cards. A company might handle visa and mastercard but not american express. If you want to accept all 3 then you have to have 2 merchant accounts and so on...

[Valen]

Check out the Indie Developer FAQ (http://www.dexterity.com/articles/indie-faq.htm). We should have a link to it somewhere on these forums if we don't already.