Q&A: Halfbrick marketing director Phil Larsen talks about the Aussie studio’s expansion plans, and the future of its franchises.

Last month Aussie developer Halfbrick, the studio behind popular iOS title Fruit Ninja, announced it would be opening up a second studio in Sydney.

Although Halfbrick has been around for 10 years, the critical and commercial success of Fruit Ninja–which also launched on Microsoft’s Kinect platform in August–put the studio in the spotlight, leading it to expand its operations.

GameSpot AU reached out to Halfbrick’s marketing director Phil Larsen to ask about setting up shop in Sydney and the studio’s future plans.

GameSpot AU: So Phil, why a new studio, and why Sydney?

Phil Larsen: One of the major reasons we’re looking to expand is because we want to keep our Brisbane studio small. For us, it’s all about the culture. If we hired 400 new people we’d definitely lose that–there would be more processes, more corporate stuff, no one would know each other, and communication would be an issue. We want to avoid that because it’s kick-ass to work at Halfbrick.

However, we still want to achieve a lot, so what that means [is] expanding. What we’ve decided to do is open up another studio in Sydney that will operate just like another Halfbrick team. The person who will be running that team used to work here in Brisbane for a long time, but recently moved to Sydney and has been working remotely ever since. So it made sense to add a few new guys and kick things off down there.

Fruit Ninja Kinect.