Iron Galaxy to add more employees
Video game company planning an expansion with at least 50 jobs
Iron Galaxy, a company that helps other video game makers adapt their products to different platforms, is planning an expansion in Orlando with at least 50 more jobs on the way.
Iron Galaxy, which was founded in Chicago and opened an Orlando studio in 2012, has more than 130 employees in Central Florida.
The company plans to add 50 jobs, with a median annual wage of $70,000, in the next five years, according to city documents for an incentive program. The company has been approved for as much as $100,000 in taxpayer dollars through the city’s STRIVE Orlando Program.
“Our actual goals are closer to 200 [employees in Orlando], but what we committed to the city was 180,” founder Dave Lang said.
Iron Galaxy has also been approved for up to $135,000 from the High Wage/High Value Job Creation Program through Orlando’s community redevelopment agency. That incentive includes 40 other jobs that have already been created during the pandemic in addition to the 50 they’re adding.
Iron Galaxy develops its own games and helps other businesses bring their games to different platforms that weren’t part of their original releases.
For example, Iron Galaxy worked with Bethesda to bring its acclaimed “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” to the Nintendo Switch console after its original release was on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows.
“We’ve helped pretty much every major publisher ship one of their biggest games,” Lang said. “We work on a lot of people’s most important games and help them get them out the door.”
As part of its expansion, Iron Galaxy is looking for larger office space in downtown Orlando than its current 18,000-square-foot office there and is targeting about 40,000 square feet. City documents
list the company’s current Orlando address at 189 S. Orange Ave.
Its workforce is expected to be close to the office, even as some work time will be spent remotely.
“Later this year, we’ll be probably looking at more permanent space, still in the downtown corridor, for sure,” Lang said. “We strongly believe we want the studios downtown where after work people can go get a drink or go get dinner or they can stick around and play board games or whatever.”
That’s good news for Orlando, with office vacancy in the city’s central business district at 16.1% in the first part of this year, according to a report from real estate firm JLL.
Lang noted the talent pool in Orlando, including graduates from Central Florida universities but also workers in other industries such as theme parks as well as simulation.
“The theme parks, as they have more attractions that offer [virtual reality] and [augmented reality], there’s a lot of talent down there that is like adjacent to games,” Lang said. “If you’ve been working on flight simulators your whole life and you want to flip over to video games that’s not that big a flip, to be honest with you.”
He said Orlando’s video game sector is incredibly healthy for a city of its size.
“It’s currently supporting two really large developers, us and EA, and then an untold amount of smaller companies that are trying to get things going,” Lang said.
Iron Galaxy’s expansion follows California-based Electronic Arts growing its Central Florida workforce to about 1,000 in recent years.
EA welcomed staff to its new five-story, downtown Orlando office in March after employees left their Maitland office to work from home during the pandemic. The new office opened at 50% capacity.
EA’s Central Florida employees build the popular Madden NFL series and are slated to make the upcoming EA Sports College Football game.
David Adelson, executive director of tech and innovation at the Orlando Economic Partnership, pointed out the popularity of the games being made in Orlando by EA and Iron Galaxy.
“They’re the most recognized games coming out of Central Florida,” Adelson said. “These two companies are creating what their customers and users are using all across the world.”