[Denpasoft/Sekai Project Shop is region-restricted?]

Sorry for double posting, but there is an update. The situation is even worse than I thought.

The support person got back to me with this message:

So not only do Denpasoft/Sekai Project have a region restriction, their country blacklist can change around at any point, they won't tell you which country is on it now or in the future so effectively, any country could get on their blacklist without forewarnings. It could be your country on their blacklist right now and you wouldn't know it.

Their criteria for a country-wide ban is an unknown, undisclosed number of fraud transactions per country. Is this number from their own transaction history or from a 3rd-party credit service that monitor global transactions? No idea.

Will a country ever get off their blacklist if/when its fraud trend decreases? No idea either. They could be adding up the number of fraud transactions for each country to the sum of all past frauds for all I know.

The only thing we know for sure is entire countries get punished for the actions of a few.

[Denpasoft/Sekai Project Shop is region-restricted?]

I tried to post these findings to r/visualnovels and it looks like it's getting blocked again. This time not even automatically removed by AutoModerator.

Can anyone here post this on r/visualnovels on my behalf? I'm basically a powerless nobody on Reddit. But I want to spread awareness of this issue to as many people in the VN community as possible.

Thank you ahead of time if you want to help.

I wouldn't put it past r/visualnovels mods to have a biased relationship with Sekai Project. Sekai Project founders came from this community after all.

[Denpasoft/Sekai Project Shop is region-restricted?]

17 hours ago, Dreamysyu said:

If they don't answer in a few days, you may try to purchase this game [NSFW] first and see if it goes through, and then purchase whatever you want to purchase. You will loose 2 dollars, but this way you can check this way if this method works for you. Actually, Denpasoft allows refunding your purchases if you don't download them, so you can probably return the money this way.

So I have an update. I tried to buy again through Coinbase and once again, the order was cancelled. But not the payment though. I saw a payment went through Coinbase and confirmed successfully (transaction link). It was only when I got redirected to Denpasoft's website that I got the message that this order was cancelled.

We can confirm now that this region restriction was not put up by their payment processor. This region restriction was put up on Denpasoft/Sekai Project's end. They have no excuse now. They have a real region restriction policy (for countries other than Japan) that they tell nobody about, and I think everybody in the community need to be aware of this.

[Denpasoft/Sekai Project Shop is region-restricted?]

2 hours ago, Dreamysyu said:

From what I understand, this restriction is made not by Sekai themselves, but by their payment processor, and thus technically doesn't really depend on them. The only thing I can recommend is to ask the support whether there are any alternative methods to do the payment (through PayPal, for example, if it's available in your country).

PayPal doesn't accept payments for adult content though so that's out of the question. (You can see in the email that I'm trying to buy from Denpasoft)

I tried to ask if they have these limitations with Coinbase and the support person just went silent.

Really helpful there, Sekai.

 

3 hours ago, tahu157 said:

They do mention that they can't sell to Japanese customers in their FAQ. Somehow it wouldn't surprise me if "Japan" actually means "all of Asia" given how opaque Sekai Project is with their business practices.

I guess. Sekai Project has always come off as the least professional VN vendor to me. Has it upsides and downsides. Seems like general incompetence when it comes to businesses is one of the downsides.

[Denpasoft/Sekai Project Shop is region-restricted?]

1 hour ago, Kiriririri said:

If you don't tell which country I'm not helping

The country is Vietnam, if you really want to know. I won't go into more identifying info, but as you may have guessed, it's a minor region.

[Denpasoft/Sekai Project Shop is region-restricted?]

So I recently made a failed purchase at Denpasoft Shop. I followed up with their Support staff, and they first responded with this message:

So their automatic fraud filter flagged me. (I can tell it was automatic and not human-reviewed because it happened split-second after placing order)

However, a phone call with my bank clarified that my card is in good status, not stolen, never used in any fraud transaction. Steam and MangaGamer accepted the same card both before and after this order with Denpasoft. I can prove that I'm the card owner if required, so there is no way this could have been a fraud transaction.

I followed up again, which prompted the support person to change the reason to this:

So apparently Denpasoft/Sekai Project Shop has a region restriction? If that was the case? How come this region restriction policy is nowhere to be found on their website(s)? What region is restricted? What is restricted? I have no idea.

Is this a known thing around here? Has anybody here been declined payment with Denpasoft/Sekai Project from a minor region? Or has anybody been a false positive of their fraud filter?

 

Btw, I tried to post this to r/visualnovels and it got automatically removed for looking like a question that's supposed to go in a megathread (which it's not really, it's allowed under their rules as " Questions for the community") and it doesn't look like the post is getting mod approval.

I have literally nowhere else to post this to. All I want to find out is whether my case is a known situation that people have been in before or an outlying case.