We sat down and chatted with Russell Williams,CEO of Flying Labs, about expanding the company during a recession, upcoming expansions for Pirates of the Burning Sea and what else is going on at the company. Enjoy!

[GDN] How did Flying Lab decide that now was the best time to work on expanding? Is this a ’buy low, sell high’ scenario where there’s a lot of talented people without work and so you might try to pick them up ’on the cheap’ as it were?

[RW] It’s really because of all the projects we’ve got going. We’re working on three MMOs right now, two that are live (Pirates of the Burning Sea and Upper Deck University) and one that we’ll be announcing in a month or two. In addition to that, we’ve got another online project that we’re co-developing with a company that we’ve been incubating inside of Flying Lab which will be announced in the next week or so. And that’s just the confirmed projects.

The truth is that we occupy a relatively unique position in the industry. We have the experience of developing, shipping, and running both a high end 3D MMO and a casual, Flash MMO. We’re independently financed and not beholden to investors, so we’re able to pick and choose the projects we want, and we’re nimble enough to adapt to the changing models of our business. That opens us up to wide range of business opportunities, and we’re taking advantage of them. The fact that it’s an employer’s market is just icing on the cake.

[GDN] Generally during a recession companies are cutting jobs and budgets, how is Flying Lab bucking that trend? Was it a sudden influx of capital or part of a long-term plan?

[RW] It’s the long-term plan. MMOs are going to expand dramatically past the boundaries of the current generation of games, and you can see that in the number of non-MMO games that are now online and have some form of persistence in them. We started the Casual division to rethink what MMOs can be, and you’re going to start seeing more varied projects coming out of us over the next year. The fact that we’re not obsessing over yet another ‘Elves and Dwarves’ game opens up new financial opportunities, and you’re seeing the results of that in our hiring.