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Text of the page (random words):
game tycoon for those interested in the business of making great video games entrepreneurial spirit a must game tycoon for those interested in the business of making great video games entrepreneurial spirit a must skip to content home business production marketing monetization platforms personal stuff older posts navigating challenging conversations posted on april 9 2020 by david j edery 1 comment as you may know spry fox has been an entirely virtual work from home studio for all ten years of its existence so i ve been getting a lot of pings from folks whose studios are suddenly in the same boat and are looking for advice in particular i m hearing from lots of folks who started out thinking wow i m amazed how easily we ve switched to working from home and after a few weeks starting transitioning to uh oh we re starting to notice more friction between employees who aren t accustomed to communicating so much via text so i wanted to share a page from the spry fox team handbook entitled navigating challenging conversations which i thought might be of help to anyone in that predicament it also covers multi cultural issues which are a separate thing but can be exacerbated in virtual environments navigating challenging conversations spry fox employs people all over the world we consider this to be a net strength not a net weakness unfortunately we miss out on regular face to face interactions and that s an unquestionable downside but we believe that having the ability to hire the best most foxy people anywhere in the world and consequently benefiting from their diverse perspectives makes us better as a whole that said spry fox only works well when we acknowledge that remote communication especially via text is more prone to misunderstanding than face to face communication research has demonstrated that you re twice as likely to misjudge someone s tone and or intent when chatting via text as you are when chatting in person for this reason we generally recommend that when a conversation starts to feel confusing unpleasant or tense for any reason you immediately switch to voice video chat if possible you should never feel reluctant to suggest this to the people whom you are communicating with similarly spry fox only works well when we all make an effort to respect each other s cultural differences please try to remember that you may have grown up under very different circumstances than other spry foxes communication styles emphasis on and very definition of politeness and comfort with physical proximity are all examples of important interpersonal areas that may vary widely from culture to culture two equally wonderful people may have a completely different idea of the proper way to discuss a topic what seems like an innocuous comment to one person might seem offensive to another we function well as a group despite frictions that might be caused by these cultural differences because we remind ourselves that spry fox makes a conscious effort to hire kind decent people who want to make the world a better place when you are interacting with another fox and they say or do something that rubs you the wrong way please remind yourself of this it s hard to be angry at someone when you stop and think they care about their work and they are probably under stress and or they may not realize that what they are saying is likely to irritate me and or there may be a simple misunderstanding underlying this situation put another way when there s doubt assume the best of intent in summary in any tense situation between spry foxes there are half a dozen innocent things totally unrelated to negativity or unprofessionalism that might be underpinning the tension being remotely distributed and chatting via the imperfect medium that is text only exacerbates such tensions try to remember that the other person probably isn t intentionally being a jerk most jerks don t make it through our hiring process and the very few who do eventually get fired whoever is upsetting you probably has different ideas and communication styles than you do or perhaps you are misunderstanding their intent or state of mind because text chat sucks odds are high that you re both lovely hard working people if you re struggling to work effectively and happily together with anyone please don t be afraid to talk to other foxes esp pat dave and danc about it we ll help and we ll be very happy to do so 1 comment posted in design production welcome to the world alphabear 2 posted on august 28 2018 by david j edery comments off on welcome to the world alphabear 2 today my spry fox family and i launched alphabear 2 this game is very special to me and i want to tell you why the first alphabear a quirky english word puzzle game for those of you who haven t played it was an award winning and relatively popular game it has been downloaded well over five million times it didn t make much money relative to other games with similar popularity but people who loved it really loved it and that has always been more important to us more interestingly we kept hearing predominantly via reviews that some people considered the game to be educational even though we hadn t intended to create an educational game truthfully i still don t believe that the original alphabear was particularly educational but i could understand why some folks felt it had that potential and it seemed like we could build on that continue reading comments off on welcome to the world alphabear 2 posted in my games lessons learned from 7 years of spry foxiness unity dev day keynote posted on july 24 2017 by david j edery comments off on lessons learned from 7 years of spry foxiness unity dev day keynote the lovely folks at unity asked me to keynote their mexico city conference and asked me to focus on topics that would benefit independent game developers i ended up trying to summarize the most important lessons that i ve learned in retrospect from 7 years of co managing spry fox with my partner daniel cook it wasn t easy to write i cut several things that seemed wise but also very possibly a product of survival bias what remains are i hope a few kernels of truth that might benefit other folks who are just starting out comments off on lessons learned from 7 years of spry foxiness unity dev day keynote posted in business alphabear postmortem my gdc 2016 lecture posted on april 6 2016 by david j edery comments off on alphabear postmortem my gdc 2016 lecture i did a 30 minute postmortem on alphabear at gdc san francisco and the good folks at ubm were kind enough to make it freely available online check it out http gdcvault com play 1023505 alphabear comments off on alphabear postmortem my gdc 2016 lecture posted in business design production monetization the affordable care act posted on october 24 2013 by david j edery comments off on the affordable care act warning this rare post of mine has nothing to do with games worse yet it s political in nature i know i know how self indulgent of me if you re easily offended by political commentary skip this article lately i ve been depressed by the number of arguments i ve witnessed about the us affordable care act that revolved around anecdotes as opposed to facts my buddy joe s premiums doubled because of this stupid law oh yeah my cousin susan was dying of cancer and couldn t get insurance until this law saved her life i expect this kind of thing from politicians let me tell you about mary sue of south dakota but not from my friends and family how about we break down a few simple stats instead continue reading comments off on the affordable care act posted in personal stuff f2p game publishing is a tricky thing posted on october 1 2013 by david j edery 1 comment when christian nutt asked me to write an article for gamasutra on the topic of publishers i wasn t sure what to do spry fox is relatively committed to self publishing our games and i haven t kept up with developments in the publishing space so after writing and discarding a few half hearted introductions to this article i decided that the most useful and honest thing that i could do is simply explain why with one aging exception spry fox has avoided working with publishers an important thing to bear in mind if you re not familiar with our company is that we are primarily focused on developing f2p games that we hope to maintain and evolve for years to come we haven t been trying to secure a slot on xbla and we haven t been trying to sell boxed product we view everything through the lens of will this partnership enable us to make a better game to learn important lessons and to eventually become more independent so that said i ve met a few really interesting publishers in the past couple years folks who seems smart motivated and knowledgeable about things that i wish i knew more about we haven t done any deals why it always comes down to three issues continue reading 1 comment posted in business the power of relativity posted on may 10 2013 by david j edery 2 comments this article was originally published in game developer magazine it was the seventh in a series of business columns that i am writing for gdm one of the most frustrating things a game developer will ever hear is that perceived genre game isn t worth price i can get other game for lower price it s frustrating for a whole bunch of reasons your game might not be very similar to the games to which it is being compared or might offer more content or replayability heck you might simply think your game is better and deserves a higher price but it doesn t matter the comparisons are being made and now you re getting 2 star reviews calling your game good but your company greedy if that sounds familiar congratulations you are part of the very large and growing club of developers who underestimated the power of relativity no not e mc2 i m talking about the fundamental human tendency to compare everything in our lives to something else we re familiar with an organic apple seems ludicrously overpriced to you at 1 99 because conventional apples sell for 0 79 but that same apple would have seemed cheap if your grocery store only carried the organic variety and if organic mangos appeared nearby for 5 99 each it s all relative continue reading 2 comments posted in business marketing pr monetization platforms avoiding tunnel vision posted on april 13 2013 by david j edery comments off on avoiding tunnel vision this article was originally published in game developer magazine it was the sixth in a series of business columns that i am writing for gdm back when i worked for xbox live i frequently commented on the dangers of what i called developer tunnel vision nearly all of the devs i spoke with were not paying attention to a diverse set of industry news sources what s more they were focused on at most couple of similar platforms and were ignoring the rest of the market back then everyone was talking about xbla psn today it s steam ios tomorrow it will be something else at the time this seemed completely insane to me even suicidal didn t these devs understand how quickly things change in our industry how quickly their current efforts could be rendered irrelevant by shifts in the marketplace or by strategy shifts made by the platforms developer tunnel vision it was so obviously reckless and short sighted continue reading comments off on avoiding tunnel vision posted in business spry fox settlement with 6waves posted on october 12 2012 by david j edery 7 comments as several news outlets have discovered we have amicably settled our lawsuit with 6waves we are very happy with the outcome and glad to be finished with this matter the full terms of the settlement are confidential but i can disclose that as a consequence of the settlement ownership of the yeti town ip has been transferred to spry fox we look forward to putting 100 of our time and energy into our games like the upcoming leap day steambirds 2 and panda poet mobile 7 comments posted in legal politics personal stuff your first f2p game where you will go wrong posted on august 21 2012 by david j edery 5 comments a video of my 2012 casual connect lecture is now freely available online ty to casual connect for sharing it 5 comments posted in business design production marketing pr monetization platforms older posts search for about me name david edery location seattle bio ceo of spry fox a game development studio focused on making the world a happier place our games include steambirds triple town panda poet realm of the mad god full biography contact info my book changing the game press reviews can be found here categories ads in games articles of interest business design production industry issues interviews legal politics marketing pr mmog monetization my games personal stuff platforms serious games social cultural uncategorized user generated content personal links daniel cook s blog spry fox homepage links of interest gamasutra gamesindustry biz 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