In the space of just eight months, Charlottetown video game developer Iron Fox Games has grown to have a staff of 21 people and is already running in the black.

Founded by industry veterans Ryan Filsinger and Chris Gallant, who previously developed the popular mobile game The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Iron Fox’s team comprises mostly the duo’s former collaborators and has so-far been an entirely bootstrapped enterprise.

The company is part of a fast-growing video game industry in the Atlantic region that Filsinger said has been spurred by digital media tax credits from the provincial governments. HB Studios in Lunenburg Nova Scotia was sold in 2021 to California games giant 2K after inking a high-profile branding deal with Tiger Woods. And Microsoft and Ubisoft both have offices in Halifax.

“The base of the business is work for hire,” said CEO Filsinger. “It’s basically an agency, where I have staff of varying skill sets, other companies need that staff and … they would prefer to outsource it.

“And then we come in and help them shore up, either hold up (support) their team or help them build out items that they might not have been able to build internally.”

Filsinger and Gallant have been working together on and off since the release of the first iPhone in 2007, when they were both hired by Prince Edward Island’s Sculpin QA to do quality assurance testing for some of the avalanche of new mobile games that aimed to capitalize on Apple’s groundbreaking touchscreen system.

Later, they were hired by Electronic Arts, with Filsinger as the lead producer on the Simpsons game before becoming director of live service for Star Wars: Rise to Power, a title that was never officially launched, but at the time was in beta testing on Android.

Then, Filsinger joined Vancouver-based developer Kabam to build and operate a P.E.I. office for the company. Filsinger's success at opening that branch inspired him to consider striking out on their own.

“I just thought it was kind of time for me to build for myself,” he said. “The market opportunity we identified was that there was a lot of work out there in the video game development space, and I had built 15 years of connections and relationships.”

Filsinger and Gallant decided to strike out on their own with a similar business model. And the first industry contact Filsinger reached out to agreed to buy their services. Now, they have three clients.

Historically, Filsinger and Gallant have specialized in town building games, in which players design and manage virtual communities.

Their competitors are largely in parts of the world like Brazil, India and the Philippines, where operating costs for businesses are less, so Iron Fox’s services cost about 25 to 30 percent more than some of their peers. But Filsinger said Iron Fox is differentiated by its staff’s experience working on licensing deals for high-profile franchises.

“My team has worked on The Simpons, Star Wars, Disney properties, Marvel properties,” he said. “Over the years, we’ve learned how to work and manage with really high-end, world-class properties.

“We know how to deal with big-name players. We know how to treat those brands with respect and what they expect when they’re dealing with external partners. We know how to talk to them.”

Charlottetown’s location at the approximate mid-point between the European and Pacific time zones also offers an operational advantage by making it simpler to conduct business internationally.

Filsinger hopes his team could grow to as many as 40 people this year. Hiring, he added, has proven fairly easy so far thanks to his pre-existing network of industry contracts.

Iron Fox operates mostly remotely, although it is a resident company at Startup Zone in Charlottetown, with staff in Atlantic Canada and a handful elsewhere in the country.

So far, Filsinger and Gallant do not foresee a need to raise equity funding, although Filsinger did not entirely close the door on the possibility.

“But we’re also looking to potentially expand and acquire other studios like ours, or maybe even buy older games and run them,” he said. “So there are places where we would take capital, but right now, on our day-to-day, we don’t need any.”