When we were speaking to our investors, one of them looked us squarely in the eyes and said: “tell us why you should start this company in Los Angeles.”
PMOG was born out of conversations at the University of Southern California Interactive Media Division; in Austin, in Helsinki, over Adium. The early prototyping all took place online - why did it matter where we were? And why should we hurl our particles into the Bay Area startup supercollider?
We figured we could find good designers in Los Angeles, plenty of unemployed writers, and the cost of housing would make it easier to bring in bodies (compared to, say, the Bay Area).
In Los Angeles, the entertainment culture is about storytelling, and marketing stories. They are slowly catching on to the idea that users make stories too. In the Bay Area, there’s less of a sense of the craft of storytelling, perhaps; instead there’s ton of iteration and creative work on “how do we connect people online.” Plus, there’s a million people who have done startups and they’re accustomed to what we’re doing. It turns out, there’s plenty of good reason to move to the heart of your industry.
We looked at what we want to do with PMOG: we want to build a game that is about being online, a game that accompanies being online. In Los Angeles, we were could meet with giant entertainment companies and independent filmmakers. In the Bay Area, we could meet with Twitter, Facebook, Dogster, Flickr, Mozilla. Since PMOG complements life on the internet, we figured we should move the HQ closer to the heart of the modern web.
GameLayers today: Merci Hammon and Justin Hall are based in East Oakland, about 25 minutes from downtown SF. Duncan Gough is based near London. We’re hiring folks that live in the Bay Area, or are willing to live here eventually 
We’ve been living here for about six weeks, head down in our live-work space. We attended a party at the offices of one of our investors, OATV - Scott Beale was there taking pics.
So here’s some recent pictures, so you know who you are dealing with 
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