A Different Person in Every Game

Startups get the party, startups get the party started. Startups get the party, startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech? You know we got tacos and tech is on smash for the green guacamole. Keep accountants counting beans. Contador cuentan frijoles. Founders trying to raise some queso. La vida San Diego. Schooler happy rapping fire. Tortillas around jalapeños. In these modern times, a craft beer and coffee. My coding yoga posse fold the The body origami, we be surfing Coronado, eating tacos El Gordo, the tacos stand in Puesto Lucha Libre en Sombrero. Gotta shout out Tech Coast Angels by the ocean, watch the sunset. La Jolla shores, entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer. Oceanside to Tijuana, SD be full of hustlers. From couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach. Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach. We interviewing founders who be shooting for the moon. #SDtacos with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on! Startups get the party, startups get the party started. Startups get the party, startups get the party started. Startups get the party, startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech? You know we got it, hey! Startups get the party, startups get the party started. Startups get the party, startups get the party started. Startups get the party, startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech? You know we got it, hey!

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom. I'm thrilled to have on Cody Germain, co-founder and CEO of Bear Club Games. Cody, thanks for joining the pod.

Thanks for having me. This is great.

This is great. It's good to have you here. Uh, we've gotten to know each other through the gaming tech community that we kind of, kind of almost built up together. Uh, over the last 2 years, just realizing there are some really interesting pockets of talent in town. And I'm glad we've gotten to know each other because, uh, it pulled me into what you're doing. So thank you.

Me too. It's been, it's been a fantastic, uh, fantastic journey uncovering how many people are actually in the gaming industry here. So thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna dive into a little bit of that because there's some we're gonna talk about that's part of your path is being part of some of these different gaming family trees, if you will. But why don't you give us a quick high level? What is Bear Club Games?

Well, Bear Club Games is a, a new competitive, uh, uh, studio that's built to— building across like competitive tech and competitive gameplay specifically in the games industry. We started in 2024, um, and we're really pushing out our first title and first platform over the next year or so. I'm really excited about that.

That is very exciting. And it comes from some of your back area of building platforms and titles within games too. But where did it all start? Like, where were you originally born and raised, and how'd you get into games and tech?

Yeah, well, I'm from upstate New York, which is not what everybody says when they're starting in the games industry. Upstate New York is a long distance from Southern California. But I grew up in upstate New York. I think for myself, really, and from a games journey, it really started really young. I'm a competitive person, like, to my core. And for me, very early, I learned that competition and play were the same thing. And playing as a person to either get better as a group or as yourself was all part of that journey for competition. So I've started really, really young on competitive play.

I played sports.

all the way up through college and after for a little while at a pretty high level. And that was always part of my journey. But when I landed at my first job, it wasn't exactly the same thing as my natural core. I started in consulting and risk. And if you've ever worked in consulting and risk, it's a lot of structure, but not a lot of creative and growth energy.

Wow.

So I did that for about 5 and a half years, 6 years at some big names like PwC and State Street and then took all of that skill and moved to games, which brought me to Southern California. And so that's where I started. Yeah.

Oh, so you both changed industries and changed geos all at the same time around that?

Yeah, we made a very conscious decision to reset the career and go after something that was gonna be very challenging and interesting and consistently growing. So that was very intentional. I really wanna get in the games industry.

And what timeframe was that and where in SoCal did you end up?

Yeah, early 2010s, uh, was when I made that jump. Um, and I ended up in Los Angeles, uh, specifically actually Santa Monica. Uh, I went to Riot. Um, and when you restart your career in games, you start right at the bottom. Uh, so I, I started as a QA analyst at Riot. Wow.

Amazing. But I mean, that's like the deep mobile on the rise. LA was booming as a gaming hub there, right?

Yeah, it had just started taking off in the early 2010s and then Riot had League of Legends, obviously, which was a global hit, probably still the biggest PC game on the planet. And it kind of kickstarted this entire industry growth in SoCal. They're actually calling it Silicon Beach now, right?

Yep.

Silicon Beach. Yeah, I visited Riot office 20— ooh, I mean, '16 or '17 timeframe. Was there?

That was awesome.

It was a cool office. I think they had just moved into like kind of Playa Vista area, right?

Yeah, they have a couple different spaces there. Their main campus is Bundy. It's right in the middle of Santa Monica, West LA. And then they have a couple of different offices now. Okay.

Yeah, really cool. Obviously Riot. Yeah, rose. I feel like they were one of the few rising during that time. I feel like Snapchat was a part of that movement as well, right? Like really from a social and media, but also, what is the interactive and creative culture coming together there?

Absolutely, yeah. There's a whole slew of companies around that time that just were hitting that massive growth angle. And Riot happened to be one of them. And they all worked together. They're all kind of interpollinating. So yeah, it was a very interesting time. Great timing for me to join the game industry, let me tell you.

And then also nearby, EA, right? Headquartered not too far away as well. So you have this whole talent pool who have both kind of done legacy and new games, new venture-backed kind of gaming as well. Would you feel like you're a part of like a kind of a new wave, even as a QA?

Yeah, well, I was only a QA for a very short amount of time. I ended up in product management pretty quickly. And when you're at Riot, there's this unique feeling when you're at Riot. It's like a— I think it's kind of a trope within the industry now, but when you're at Riot, it feels like you're kind of insulated from a lot of things. Riot has a really, insular culture. Players there are working and they bleed Riot Red, as you say. So you don't necessarily feel the outside of the industry, but when you poke your head up, you can see, you just see and hear how all the games industries are moving at the same time. All the companies are moving at the same rate. So it was really interesting to see that.

Really interesting. What got you to San Diego then eventually?

Yeah, so while I was at Riot, I was there for about 7 years. I went from QA to product. And in the product role, which I started, I think probably about 9 months after I started, I jumped into product. I touched everything in the games industry. I worked on platform, client, publishing tech. I was part of— I had a major role in the Legends of Runeterra launch, the Valorant launch. And then I ultimately landed back on League of Legends and got to lead their competitive, which is amazing. That was exactly what I wanted to do when I started there. But after getting to that place, it, you start lifting your head up, you start seeing like, okay, I've done a lot of different great things here, worked with some really, really great people. What else is happening in the industry? And when I lifted my head up, I didn't have to go looking for anything. A lot of companies came to me, which was great. This 2022 is a really great time to be picking your head up. And I got to basically choose where I wanted to go. And when I was looking at what Epic was doing, what Rocket League had done, what San Diego was as a city, it just, it was like the perfect fit. So I was like, that's what I'm gonna be doing. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna take that role and see how we can expand that. So I jumped down to San Diego 2022.

Yeah. Oh wow. Oh, semi-recent to when we met. That's cool. I didn't realize that you were that necessarily new in that area.

Cool.

Yeah, yeah. The search was long, but the move decision was very quick.

Yeah. Did it feel like, I mean, take me through your both perception of San Diego as a gaming community before you moved here versus what you've learned now? Like where do you think it's now compared to, especially coming from LA where you were in the middle of a big gaming tech community?

Of course.

Yeah.

Los Angeles, you could probably like skip a stone and you hit another gaming company, right? They're everywhere and they're all very successful. Like, the talent density is insane, and that's a really great thing for Los Angeles. But when I came to San Diego, you don't necessarily feel that because San Diego is fairly spread out in terms of, like, geographically spread out, but also, like, talent is spread out across North County, like, Eastern San Diego, like, downtown. So when I joined Epic, I actually didn't feel the same level of talent density. You had a great team at Psyonix, which was fantastic. And Epic has a presence, Sony has a presence up here, Jam City, like Rockstar, right? But they're all very separate. There's not really a connective community. So that was the first shock to me. I was like, oh, all these great companies, but you don't see or hear anything about it. I know we've explored that over the last year or so, kind of trying to pull all that together. I think that's still a challenge that San Diego has, but boy, are there some great people here, I'll be honest.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the uncovering that Carlsbad specifically, one zip code has so many, was really interesting to uncover. Obviously led eventually to you, I think, being, you know, being a part of that community for your new company. But the company you joined was, I feel like, like the one that was the farthest from everyone. It was downtown. Right? Like, take us through joining a San Diego-based and headquartered gaming company.

Yeah, so it was actually a very different experience than working at Riot. Epic has a very remote-forward policy coming out of, like, the COVID time period. But they had this really great office in Little Italy. It's on, like, the 23rd, 24th floor of A Street, right at the bottom of Little Italy. And I'm up in Carlsbad. I chose to stay, settle in Carlsbad. It's great for families. And I just made the commute. So early on it was interesting because I was one of the few people that was really in the office every day. And that wasn't something I was used to, but it did like kind of force me to kind of get out there and see, okay, where is the team? Where can we meet them at where they are? Where are other people in the industry that I can kind of get to know and start to form these connective tissues? So it was probably a really good thing that it was so far away. Because it forces you to change your behavior and get to know people outside the bubble. So I really, really appreciated that. I think it's only gotten more connected over the past 2 years, 2, 3 years now. And it's really, I think, becoming a great place for more and more talent to really come to because there's a lot of opportunity for that connection. So that was very different. One of the things that was also very different is that working at Epic, the headquarters is actually in North Carolina. Psyonix was headquartered here in San Diego, but Epic as a whole is in Raleigh or Cary, North Carolina. So you're working across the coast and then also internationally. So your hours become very interesting. But yeah, it was a good transition, a good growing transition for sure.

And Epic had already bought the company, but there was— there's still kind of this local, local, like, studio kind of community feel within the company itself.

Yeah, yes. Psyonix, I think one of the strongest things that Psyonix had besides obviously a fantastic, like, competitive title, live service title, was their studio was very culturally different than a lot of other studios. They're very— not, I wouldn't say family-oriented, but very close, tight-knit. like scrappy team. I thought that was a superpower that that team had. And that's kind of a testament to actually being in San Diego. I feel a lot of like San Diego culture is very much embedded in that Psyonix group. So that was a really new thing for me. I think a lot at Riot, you have a lot of that same feeling, but it's mostly tied to the products that Riot makes, that people are obsessed and love the products. So they feel very connected to each other, whereas Psyonix is very much the They're very much connected to the studio. And I think that's like, that's San Diego in a nutshell, your local towns and such.

It's great to hear that perspective, especially within comparing LA and San Diego. I mean, these are— many people just lump in SoCal, right? They're just like, you know, SoCal acts like SoCal. I too believe that we actually act as 2 very different ecosystems, different culturally. People choose one or the other because of cultural differences. I think LA versus San Diego and And you can even see that in LA-based companies with a studio in San Diego, right? Some of them are really like, oh, don't look at my thing. Uh, I'm busy building. You can't, we can't work. We're competitors, right? It's like, but the talent here isn't like, the talent's gonna move from place to place because they're not leaving Carlsbad, right? So yes, you may feel you're competitive from a consumer who's buying your game, which by the way, everyone buys every game. If you're a consumer gamer, you're not like, I'm only buying GTZ 5. but not playing, you know, some other game. So I don't know, I just find that where other places are unnecessarily guarded and competitive, in San Diego we found we're better together. Like, we might as well learn the things that have been hard-fought wins, that's for sure.

So absolutely. And it's also, I think, better for, um, the, the talent and the employees working at those companies to feel like they have a more collaborative, open environment. I think that's unique to at least San Diego, or my experience is San Diego. That doesn't exist necessarily in LA.

So take us through a little bit of like when you got bit by the entrepreneur bug, because it's one thing you've gone through a few of, you know, working at some big companies or maybe were small but rode the wave to big to suddenly now want to start your own. It's a very different path. Like take us through when you started feeling that.

Yeah, so I actually, I think it was actually the first day at Riot that I said to myself, because you're immersed in this open environment where like there's so many problems to solve, like, and no one's telling you no. I think the first day at Riot, I was like, oh, I want to do this for myself one day. Like, it was like literally the first day. And I think that stems a lot from being, when I was younger, just like needing a creative outlet and needing like the space to go after things when they were showing up. So I really cultivated that at Riot. In 2020, I did a little bit of my own dabble in like a company while I was there called Prio App. And Prio App was, I saw like the first start of like the AI infrastructure coming out. I saw what kind of like LLMs were starting to do early on. And I was like, you know, I'm a product guy. I think there's an opportunity to go after prioritization as an AI, like, supported thing. So I started Prio App and we built out this tool and it was helping teams prioritize more effectively automatically based on information. And I learned a lot doing that because it was kind of a side gig. I knew, I learned how to set up a company. I learned how to like run through like not having an audience that's already paying and all that stuff. And we, and we got that company to a, to a spot where it's like, okay, people are paying for it, but it really wasn't solving the problems that were actually there. And I kind of learned that fast. And I was like, you know what, I don't need to keep doing this if it's not solving a problem. So I ended up just shutting it down. But I was like, that is definitely something I'm interested in. So I guess that stayed with me through my time at Epic and I couldn't get it out of my head. So ended up seeing a massive market open up while I was there and I was like, I have to go after it again. So I just decided to do it.

Amazing. Okay, so what was the original idea for Bear Club versus where it is now? Like we always love to hear, you know, the morphing iteration of this current piece.

So you mentioned being at like big companies and I was at big companies the entire time, PwC to State Street to Riot to Epic, like, it's not— there's no small companies there. But part of being at the big companies, especially being across so many different products, is you cannot ignore how players are playing and consumers are behaving or seeing how trends evolve. And when I was at Epic, I had a front seat view of the entire industry. Like, Epic is a huge player. Data that comes from outside is comparative to the products that they already have. And you can see trends of how players start to play and what they want. And what I had found was that a lot of the newer players and some of the middle-aged players too had started to navigate into multiple titles and were starting to feel a loss of their identity and their personal play and stuff like that. And part of the reason for that is that the industry's kind of separated into these like walled gardens where you are a different person in every game. But that's not true, obviously, in real life. So after really like thinking about it for a while and kind of identifying what was both an opportunity but also something that I was passionate about, I kind of narrowed it down to competitive play. Like the competitive games industry is massive. There's over 700 million competitive players in the world. They play 2 to 3 games regularly every single week, and they really want a personalized experience. And with tech as what it is and how it's growing, the opportunity to give them that personalized experience across a variety of different games that are connected was just— that was it. I think that was the golden, the golden through thread. So I jumped, I jumped from Epic in July 2024. Spent about a month or two making sure that I had the right people to start with. And I started Bear Club Games, which is the holding company for Bear Infinite Games, our studio, in August 2024. And we went after that.

And what was, what was it? I mean, obviously it's more of an idea then, What's— take us through kind of, and now towards what we're going to be playing soon.

Yes, we're playing soon. So, uh, the idea then was always like one game first with a platform proof for personalized play. We call the personalized aspect of it Spark, uh, and Spark is our, our learning, uh, algorithm that kind of learns from you as you play and then able to surface up, uh, um, experiences in close to real time as possible that match your skill level, your personal thing, whatever. But the real important part in games is that it has to be proved with an actual game. And that's our wedge product. We call it Project Grizzly. And Project Grizzly is really our first title that's using this platform going forward. Project Grizzly is an action sport. Action sport is, is basically a moment-to-moment true digital sport that we're creating that lets a player respond to physics in real time and doesn't give them any kind of benefit over other players. So it's a very fair competitive experience, and that is absolutely perfect if you're trying to create a competitive platform for all games to kind of launch off. So we have that. It is— it has been an amazing ride. The game is way better than we had initially thought it would be, with way less resources to make it. So it's in a really good spot. The platform is live and operational, so we're going to be starting to get players in very, very soon, which is fantastic. We haven't had to pivot much, which is great, mostly because I think we did a really strong job upfront scoping and identifying the opportunity. And then making sure that we were building in a very iterative way. So I haven't pivoted much from there. That's great.

Well, I'm eagerly awaiting to get a chance to play as well too, since Rising Tide Partners joined and invested earlier this year, mostly just from watching, you know, you lead both your own team but lead in the community of gaming leaders, which has been awesome to see. Uh, so congrats on, on just, you know, continuing to carry the torch forward, uh, on the next generation of gaming builders.

And we can get you in as early as next week.

All right, do it. Let's do it for sure. I always have this— I always have a— people always, uh, have a block with me on Steam because I, I'm an Apple guy, I'm a Mac guy, and people are always like, Windows. Oh yeah, so fix that. I'll come play on yours. That's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Um, or we'll do a little gaming night here at the new office, uh, here. Have you guys— we can do a little test run. That'd be fun.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Okay, so take us through, you know, a little bit— when— yeah, when can people get their hands on and get starting to test and try besides at our upcoming game night, uh, preview that we just decided to do?

Yeah, so, uh, we've started building out our, uh, playtest batch right now, um, and so we're shooting for an end of October. playtests. We're trying to get at least 500 people in at that point. And when we say playtest, this is really the start of our publishing ramp. We believe in kind of bringing people along as we go and then slowly growing that over time. So our target is for end of October, getting players in on a private build. That build will slowly turn into a scaled build over the next 3 to 4 months, and then we're hoping to get it out the door formally by spring next year. Which is, which is really, really great. I think the, I think the broader view of that is we also in that process are trying to bring in developers to build the next couple games in the ecosystem. And that's something that we're gonna start ramping as well in parallel is bringing in additional development teams to do that work. So yeah, we're really on the, on the last push for this first, this first Product launch.

So very exciting. Well, we're excited to have another great game, great title and platform coming out of here. And yeah, where we get the gaming— we call it the Gaming Tech Leaders Meetup. We've been doing about every other month, I think, is what we're averaging lately. It's been pretty fun to move it around, to go inside a studio, to go to a restaurant. And then we even had an offline game night. at, uh, USAopoly. That was pretty fun earlier this year, just do some like board games. Um, so it was cool to see just the breadth of where games are within San Diego just from that. So we do that every other month. I think our next one, well, maybe it should be, you know, preview night of, uh, Project Grizzly here.

I would be happy to help set that up. That would be really great.

Texting Tim as we speak here. Get offline.

Uh, let's do it.

The piece that comes, that, that needs to come together alongside this playing games is obviously eating tacos together. That's what we do in San Diego. You know, I think a lot of people think of gaming like it's like a late night thing and therefore needs to have late night tacos with it, but you can game all day and there's the right taco for the right game, right? So where, where are your, what are the right tacos for you?

Yeah, I, I, the, I have a very personal taco experience here in San Diego because my wife and I actually got married here. We got married down in Loose Loft right next to the Padres Stadium.

Yeah.

And it was fantastic. It's so much fun. But our food was actually from Salud Taco, which was in the barrio for, for a while, but they're no longer there, unfortunately. But those tacos were our favorite for so long. Um, so good.

Always a line, always a line at Salud, uh, which is shocking to see when they said we're going— we're closing our doors. It's like, what? There's people still waiting for their taco who've been standing in line, you know, when they said that, which is really a shame.

Yeah, I think there's still a catering company.

Oh, that's good to know. All right, yeah, so we will— maybe we'll have to cater something from Salud just to have it because, yeah, they were a legend in Barrio Logan for sure.

Yeah, I'll be there wherever you want to be catering. So I'll bring him, we'll bring him on game night for sure.

Um, well, Cody, this is great to hear your story, uh, the depth that, uh, you've got within gaming. And now, you know, here we go with the next new gaming platform from, uh, from you and team. Uh, where can people find info? Are you still trying to stay under the radar for right now?

So we're not fully under the radar anymore. So our website is still www.bearinfinitegames.com. There's a bunch of variety URLs that go with that, but that's the big one. And on there you can actually sign up for our first playtest, our private playtest. We are going to start publicly pushing those out over the next few weeks. But yeah, we are rolling right now, so it's a very exciting time to be part of this.

Awesome.

Join the— go to the website and play some Pong right then and there, right?

Yep, yep. There is a Pong game on the website. Yes, love it.

Well, cool.

Well, Cody, thanks again for being on, but thanks for what you're building, and we'll see you for game night soon.

Cheers. See you soon, Neal. Party started. You want tech and tacos? Tacos and tech. You know we got tacos and tech is on smash. Fold the green guacamole. Keep accountants counting beans. Contador cuentan frijoles. Founders trying to raise some queso. La vida San Diego. Schooler happy rapping fire. Tortillas around jalapeños. In these modern times of craft beer and coffee. My coding yoga posse. Fold the Body origami. We be surfing Coronado, eating tacos El Gordo. The tacos staying in puesto. Lucha libre and sombrero. Gotta shout out Tech Coast Angels by the ocean. Watch the sunset. La Jolla shores. Entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer. Oceanside to Tijuana. SD be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses. Houses right on the beach. Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach. We interviewin' founders who be shootin' for the moon. #SDTacos with your host, Neal Bloom. Come on! Startups get the party, startups get the party started. Startups get the party, startups get the party started. Startups get the party, startups get the party started. You want techin' tacos, tacos, tacos. Tacos and tech, you know we got it, hey! Startups get the party, startups get the party started. What? Startups get the party, startups get the party started. What? Startups get the party, startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech, you know we got it, hey!