Alphabear dev Spry Fox reveals CEOs and staff have taken pay cuts to finish its “biggest game ever” after “extremely fast” spinout from Netflix

The founders of Spry Fox, the developer behind mobile hits Alphabear and Triple Town, have confirmed their exit from Netflix and shared details on the studio’s new structure and release plans for their next game Spirit Crossing.

It was revealed last month by Game File that the studio was being divested by Netflix, which had acquired it in 2022, as part of the streaming giant’s changing games focus. The company previously shut down its nascent AAA studio and cancelled a number of titles being developed by external studios.

Spry Fox founder David Edery today announced via a post on the company’s website that it had exited Netflix and currently had “nearly 50 people” working on its “biggest title ever”, cozy multiplayer life sim Spirit Crossing. The team is “mostly full-time, some as part-time contractors or co-developers through partner studios”, and Edery characterised it as being small for the scale of the game, saying that comparable titles would require twice or four times the headcount.

“To make this work, we’re also making real sacrifices,” he wrote. “All of us are taking large pay cuts.” He said he and co-founder Dan Cook had “reduced our salaries to $20,000/year, and we’ve spent our own cash to buy the studio back. And we are taking all the equity in the new company and giving the majority of it to the rest of the studio’s employees.”

“In a world where executives tend to make 10x the salaries that employees do, and have 100x the equity, we want Spry Fox to be an example of something fairer and hopefully much better. More than ever, we are all in this together.”

He described the exit from Netflix as “extremely fast”, with only three months between “‘maybe we should explore this’ to ‘we’re independent again.’ To put this in perspective, a spinout of this magnitude would typically take 6 to 9 months. So we’ve been sprinting to disentangle ourselves. It has been a LOT of work.”

“For the past three years, the game industry has been such a bleak place. Countless companies have shut down, including some truly great studios that made history-changing games.”

“Those headaches aside, we are so thankful. For the past three years, the game industry has been such a bleak place. Countless companies have shut down, including some truly great studios that made history-changing games. I am very grateful that during this otherwise dark time, something this surprising and hopeful could happen for us.”

Spirit Crossing will still launch as a free mobile title for Netflix subscribers, but the studio is now working on a Steam release targeting a spring beta and a launch later in 2026, with plans to add other platforms.

Netflix’s divestment of Spry Fox was the latest in the company’s retreat from previous gaming endeavours. There is widespread concern in the industry that its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros will lead to significant cuts at Warner’s games division. The company’s attention has shifted towards broad-appeal games that use phones as the controller, with a “Fortnite-like social gaming experience“. Lisa Burgess, GM Netflix Games (Kids) told GamesIndustry.biz that offering games to kids was a key part of the company’s strategy, with recognisable IP being the main focus, and the company was working to balance discoverability with parental controls.