If you have been paying attention to gaming news recently, and, well.. you’re reading our blog so you probably have been, you may have seen ads for the Humble Indie Bundle.

First of all, let me say awesome job to the Wolfire guys et al.  The indie gaming community constantly impresses me with its community-oriented and generous mentality; I haven’t been a member long but I’ll work hard to live up to it.

That said, if you’ve checked out the bundle, you would have noticed 3 payment buttons at the bottom: one for Amazon, one for Google, and one for Paypal.  Well… we’ve been working on setting that up for ourselves, due to the oncoming beta release and being keen on offering some pre-order related deals, and being Canadian doesn’t really help things very much…

After numerous accounts department email questions and various humming and hawing over the American federal and state taxation systems, we’ve learned that, as a Canadian company, you can technically use all of these services (which is great!).

Amazon Simple Pay: Simple Pay requires that, even if you’re a Canadian business, you need an American non- P.O box address, an American phone number, and an American driver’s license number.  They assure me, however, that you don’t actually need an American business, but these things are going to be at best awkward and at most very difficult for a Canadian company (thankfully we have some people on “the inside” …of the border).

Google Checkout: Google is a little bit less requiring but definitely more restrictive on the use of their service.  If you don’t have a tax ID (aka if you’re not an American business), and if you don’t want to register a specific SSN (eg if you have no American scapegoats.. er Valued Employees, or if you’re a corporation), then you are required to submit credit information.  For people in our shoes as a bootstrapping company this is also… really not something that we can do.  We’re going to need a Valued Employee to take responsibility for this one if we go for it.

Paypal: Paypal’s embracing of Canadian business is awesome.  It’s super easy and effective to accept payments with Paypal.  The downside?  Well, their fees are quite high if you do small payments, so they’re not our first choice, but I do appreciate that they make it easy for us to set it up.

That’s all for now; evidently I have to get to work writing some XML databases… how did I end up with this job? ; P