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.
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.)
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.
>>So Airbnb is holding up somewhere in the range of 50% - 100% of the vacancy rate of units in Metro Vancouver.
Which is insignificant, given the vacancy rate is a very small fraction of the total housing supply and has a natural level not affected by rental supply increases.
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 ;)
I suspect that managing a day job and a kid impacted the schedule quite a bit. I recall a quote from another thread, "Once you have kids you are only allowed one hobby."
An interesting example of this is Dejobaan "1, 2, 3 Kick It! Drop that beat like an ugly baby" which is effectively a mashup of their earlier game, "AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!" and AudioSurf. They released a prototype to pre purchasers, which then they put on Steam (privately) for ease of distribution.
Leading up to Portal 2's release, with the potato promotion, a still unfinished "Kick It!" was involved as part of the promotion, with users needing to obtain a certain ingame achievement. However, it was not at all made clear to users that this game was still in alpha. Tons of users had a bad experience, and a game that wasn't even really intended to be played yet ended up getting exposed to the games industry at large, of course, with a horrible reception.
Please don't let the delay overly worry you. Here's what the great master Shigeru Miyamoto said:
"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."
(from:
http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Shigeru_Miyamoto/Quotes).
Of course, you could do 'updates' but you have to make a good impression with your first cut.
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.
The game they built is the property of Digital Chocolate, so whether they're from that company or not, they're copying another company's game. The ethics of that are of course debatable.
They copied the gameplay style and tutorial. Again, I mentioned many times it's a smart move. I don't think they copied CODE or did anything shady. But go play galaxy life and then Clash of Clans. It's dead obvious.
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).
We will create a 'Content' section in magazine issue page on the website, where we list and link to all the articles appearing in that particular issue, along with its HN discussion.
Hopefully this provide an alternative for other readers.
"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.
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.)