kenpratt

If you're a Canadian merchant, you can add a USD bank account to avoid the 2% currency conversion fee. This bank account can either be with a Canadian bank, or a US bank.

Source: I work at Stripe, but in addition to that, previously started a Canadian company using Stripe, and like you did mostly payments to US customers in USD. I had deposits directly into both a USD bank account held at a Canadian bank as well as a USD bank account held at a US bank, and did not pay the 2% conversion fee. I actually never received CAD directly at all.

More details: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts

But yes, other than certain exceptions such as this one, getting payouts in non-local currencies on Stripe is limited, and we're working on improving that.

(edit: This assumes you have expenses in USD, or a cheap way to convert USD to CAD, to avoid a ~2% fee from your bank on the conversion. Personally I've used Interactive Brokers which charges 0.002% for USD/CAD conversions.)

I disagree that Airbnb is not one of the causes of the shortage.

As of 2011 there were 306,105 renter-occupied units in Metro Vancouver (http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/Pla...)

As of April 2017 there were an estimated 5,000 units on Airbnb (https://www.straight.com/news/943456/average-airbnb-prices-a...), but unclear if that's Metro Vancouver or a greater area.

The City of Vancouver estimates that 1,600 rental units could be returned to the rental supply (http://www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2017/11/14/vancouver-...).

The vacancy rate was 0.9% as of Nov 2017 (https://www.biv.com/article/2017/11/metro-vancouver-rental-v...).

So, let's do some rough math: 306k units * 0.9% vacancy rate = 2,754.

So Airbnb is holding up somewhere in the range of 50% - 100% of the vacancy rate of units in Metro Vancouver. It isn't a giant number, but if they were released back onto the market, that's a significant amount of stock to be available for renting, and I'd expect would relieve some upward pressure on rent prices.

That said, I don't disagree that there are other causes too, such as zoning, lack of many new builds until the last 10 years, and empty apartments. But my hunch is that Airbnb is a bigger factor than empty apartments, and a lesser factor than zoning/builds.

As David said, there are things you can pay for in the game. But anything can be unlocked by playing for free, so you aren't forced to pay for anything, and we don't grind you to frustrate you into paying. We're probably erring on the side of being too generous with our F2P model. Many players tell us they already earn too many cards to handle for free ;)

Thanks, David! Happy to hear you're enjoying it :)

I think to be fair, a bunch of those insertions/deletions were from checking in node_modules early in the dev cycle. But the 5k commits is accurate :)

And for schedule, it was vast underestimation of the scope of a digital CCG combined with having day jobs => bad estimation and inconsistent hours.

Thanks! I'm more of the "launch early and iterate" philosophy, but unfortunately with games you need to be much more polished than a web/SaaS app.

I can't believe Braid isn't on that list. SUCH a great game. Also, Portal is a must-play if you haven't already.

From the article: "5 out of the 8 founders and executive team are from Digital Chocolate, the makers of Galaxy Life".

So it's a pretty large mis-representation to say they copied another game, as they were on the team who built said game (granted, the writer doesn't do a very good job of conveying that). MUCH different than cloning a competitor.

Having a suggested $3/month subscription for having the PDF mailed to you but ALSO having the PDF available for free on the website could be the best of both worlds. Those who can afford to pay, do so, but you can still link to the free version (which could have nag pages inserted).

This reminds me of the famous poem "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann. Same sort of philosophy.

http://www.fleurdelis.com/desiderata.htm

"Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit." is a good method of keeping overly dramatic interpersonal interactions from affecting your top idea.

Lawnchair (http://brianleroux.github.com/lawnchair/) is similar to this, but you have to pick an adapter (see http://github.com/brianleroux/lawnchair for browser list).