When Netflix first acquired cozy game developer Spry Fox in 2022, it made a lot of sense. The studio had been around for over a decade and had several hits with mobile games like Triple Town and Alphabear. That approachable style of puzzle game seemed like a good fit for Netflix’s mobile-first strategy, and, as Spry Fox cofounder David Edery tells me, the partnership also meant that the team could focus on making the experiences they wanted to build without having to worry about monetization. “We just never were that good at making money from our games,” Edery explains.
Now, three years later, Spry Fox is once again independent after buying itself out from Netflix. The news comes as the streaming service’s fledgling gaming efforts are shifting, with a focus on TV-based games as opposed to mobile titles. Even studios behind successful games, like Squid Game: Unleashed, have been shuttered as part of the changes. But for Spry Fox, the decision to separate from Netflix was done for a different reason: to reach as large an audience as possible with the studio’s upcoming MMO Spirit Crossing.
“At some point, I increasingly became concerned about the fact that being a Netflix member-only game was a real issue for it,” Edery explains. “It’s a highly social game. People want to be able to play with their friends. If their friends are not Netflix members, that’s kind of a problem.”
Spirit Crossing is a large-scale multiplayer game about fostering friendship and community in a fantastical and adorable world. It’s the biggest experience the studio has ever made, but also feels like a natural progression; after achieving success with those early mobile titles, Spry Fox pushed further into the so-called “cozy” genre with the Animal Crossing-style series Cozy Grove. While those games are single-player, Spirit Crossing aims to do something similar but in a virtual world filled with lots of players. The goal is ambitious. “We genuinely believe this is our chance to reduce loneliness in the world,” says Edery. “That’s the sum total of everything that we care about.”
Development on Spirit Crossing predates the Netflix deal, and in fact represents something of a brief history of indie game funding over the last few years. The game’s initial prototype began life as an exclusive for Google’s Stadia streaming service. After Stadia’s high-profile implosion, Spry Fox retained ownership of the project, and eventually Epic picked up the game as part of its relatively new publishing initiative.
“We genuinely believe this is our chance to reduce loneliness in the world.”
“That was great because they were very supportive and they gave us a big budget,” Edery says of working with Epic. “And then the Netflix thing kind of came out of nowhere. I wasn’t looking to be acquired at the time, and I certainly didn’t think it would be Netflix of all companies, but they came by and it seemed like a good idea for a few different reasons.”
From the outside, Netflix’s efforts in gaming have seemed chaotic. The company has tried everything from games based on its shows to building a AAA studio without much success. Last year at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Netflix’s president of games, Alain Tascan, outlined a new plan focused on specific types of games, including what he called “mainstream” titles aimed at large audiences, of which Spirit Crossing was shown as an example. Of late, however, Netflix seems mostly focused on cloud-based games played on TVs instead of phones.
Image: Spry Fox
Despite all of that, Edery says the team at Spry Fox wasn’t impacted much by Netflix’s changing priorities. “We were essentially brought in to make and launch Spirit Crossing,” he says. “We just kept doing what we were doing, so I think we were less affected by changes than maybe other folks internally would have been. We had a pretty clear vision and, for better or worse, we weren’t going to be steered off of that.”
Edery says that at each stage, from Stadia to Netflix, Spirit Crossing grew in scope and ambition. And eventually it became clear that a game built around connecting as many people as possible didn’t fit so snugly in Netflix’s plans, which limit the platforms a game can launch on. Edery notes that Cozy Grove, for example, was most successful on the Nintendo Switch, where cozy games are very popular. “Not being able to be on the Switch is a real limitation, possibly a really problematic limitation,” he says of Spirit Crossing.
“Not being able to be on the Switch is a real limitation”
So the split from Netflix was done in the best interest of the game; while a Switch version has yet to be announced, Spirit Crossing will be coming to PC in addition to the iPhone and Android. And there’s still a partnership with Netflix in place, as the mobile version will still be free and exclusive to subscribers. “It still has to make sense for Netflix,” Edery notes. But there are obvious risks involved in going independent, and already the team is making sacrifices. Edery says that he and fellow cofounder Daniel Cook have reduced their salaries to $20,000 a year.
The majority of development on Spirit Crossing was finished during the three years Spry Fox was under the Netflix umbrella, and the team expects to launch the game this year. (You can currently sign up to play an alpha of the game.) Even before Spirit Crossing launches, Spry Fox’s long journey back to independence represents a rare positive story in an industry plagued with layoffs, cancellations, and studio closures. But there’s one big thing the team still has left to do, and it’s not something Edery is looking forward to: “We have to figure out how to make money now.”