Moritz Baier-Lentz has been famous in my circles for starting Game Changers, an annual showcase of great gaming and tech startups at our GamesBeat Next events(a new one is coming on November 2-3, 2026 in SF). He was always a big believer in the power of gaming, but now he says he has decided to double down on gaming, AI and frontier technologies.
After 3.5 years at Lightspeed, Baier-Lentz has left that post and joined McKinsey & Company, OpenAI, and TPG as a senior adviser. He has also started his own family office as an investor. Baier-Lentz has had a sharp eye for game companies and he has boldly backed some of the biggest bets in the game industry. But he is also now investing his personal capital and time in both gaming and technology at the same time.
I interviewed him about this move and we talked about the opportunities that lie before him as an investor. Meanwhile, his advisory work will focus on AI transformation projects across the media and technology sectors, supporting many of the same CEOs and presidents who have become close collaborators, friends, and mentors over the past decade.
“But what I’m most grateful for is getting to spend 100% of my energy within an industry I deeply care about. From shaping my formative years as a competitive player to hosting the annual CEO Forum, which now convenes the leaders of over 80% of the $200 billion global gaming market,” he said in a recent post on LinkedIn. I got him to elaborate on all of that.
He noted last week that he joined as an investor and adviser at Decart, which raised $300 million as part of its focus on the combo of games and AI. He said the focus is on building previously impossible experiences using AI for games.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: How are you enjoying the new life here?
Moritz Baier-Lentz: It’s good. It’s been a lot of hard work this year to pull everything together. On the advisor side, those were three individual conversations, even though those parties have also recently announced partnerships between each other, between OpenAI and McKinsey and then between OpenAI and TBG. There’s going to be some overlapping topics between them. There’s a rationale for picking those three. But I’ll still spend most of my time investing. It’s just with my own capital and time.
GamesBeat: What have you decided is within your scope? Especially compared to what you were doing at Lightspeed.
Baier-Lentz: The scope, I would say, is similar to Lightspeed, the investment scope. It’s going to be 80% at the intersection of games and AI, or media and AI. Then the other 20% will be pure play gaming or pure play AI. Everything will have either a gaming or AI angle, and most things will probably have both.
There are a few things in frontier tech that are games-adjacent, if you stretch the definition a bit. For example, we owe Nvidia and GPUs to gaming. There are things on the computational side that are maybe not necessarily thinking of themselves as something immediately relevant or related to gaming, but often are. But I need to stick where my unfair advantage is, where my expertise is, which is in games and media. And over the last two or three years specifically in how that intersects with AI.
There’s a lot of interesting things happening, as you know. AI-assisted game creation. Now we see more from the incumbents on that, like Unity and Unreal. There’s also a lot of interesting startups helping with–I would call it tasteful, discreet ways of automating game creation, or even doing things like prompt to game. Then there’s the whole other part of how AI can do this, or maybe birth new experiences, which is world models. Probabilistic and generative approaches, which have a lot of shortcomings right now, but this is a really interesting area. Those two are not disparate things. They can also work together. Companies like General Intuition and Decart. We have a big announcement with Decart coming on Monday. There’s real stuff happening.
The other high-level thing I see–this is now where it maybe relates more to the work I’ll help OpenAI and McKinsey with. Speaking to the CEOs in the industry quite a bit, I think everyone is thinking about how to use AI. There’s no single CEO in the gaming and media industries that’s not looking at how to work this. It’s difficult to use it for the player experience, the core experience, today. Partly because a lot of the tech isn’t quite there yet to do it at scale. It’s not good enough quality. It’s too costly. Or maybe in some cases there just aren’t good tools to help accelerate or make things cheaper. There is a reality to that.
GamesBeat: The narrative that’s taking hold right now is the one about how AI is an evil thing. It’s taking away jobs from game developers. Gamers feel like it’s ripping off artists. That single narrative is taking control in the west, especially among U.S. gamers. How does an industry that’s trying to innovate take that narrative back? That same narrative really stopped the metaverse. It stopped blockchain from getting wide adoption.
Baier-Lentz: I think those are not comparable.
GamesBeat: Blockchain games at least. How can the industry properly communicate so that it takes control?
Baier-Lentz: I got some heat for pretty blunt comments I made at GDC. I’m happy to make them again because I think most people are just fundamentally wrong on this. This technology doesn’t necessarily owe game developers anything. It’s on them to figure this out. Are they writing assembly code? I don’t think so. This is not the first wave of tools to help you do more or better work in a shorter time. And by the way, I find it quite sad, actually, how poorly the response has been from the game developer community. I said that at GDC. I got some fire for that. I’ll say it again.
I have full conviction, and I think clear visibility into how this is going to play out. There’s basically two ways for game developers to do this. You can raise your pitchforks and revolt against it until it’s too late. That’s a certain way to lose your job. Or you can do what always happens when there are new technology shifts that have real value, and by the way, it has tremendous value in other industries and disciplines. That’s why I think the metaverse and web3 argument doesn’t hold up here.
GamesBeat: I do believe those were less important technologies, for sure.
Baier-Lentz: Web3 was centered around new forms of value distribution. It also required some kind of philosophical buy-in. I never made a web3 gaming investment, for what it’s worth. And then metaverse was probably always just very loosely defined, a bit unclear. But AI is providing tremendous value across many other industries.
The gaming industry right now is in a sweet spot where it’s easy to point to something that’s assaulting your creative process or taste or whatever. At the same time, there are no real AI games or AI-generated experiences that are really good. You can point at this and say, “Aha, it’s just slop. No one wants this. Making games is really hard. It’s systems and design and balancing.” I know all of this. I’ve known this for 20 years. I love these games. That’s why I played 17,000 hours of Diablo II and just reinstalled it again. I know all of this. I speak with that knowledge.
People always think of VCs as just being stupid and removed from all of this. No. We know all of that, and then we also actually pay really close attention to what’s happening in other industries and enterprises. I’m not saying I’m smarter than everyone, but I think sometimes we see things more clearly.
GamesBeat: That does relate a bit into another question. You could make so much more money in the pure AI investment area. Why even bother with games? It’s something Jensen Huang has had to deal with. Why does Nvidia still make graphics chips? I’ve gone through that. Should I just cover AI as a tech writer, or should I still be a games writer? For me, the passion for games pulled me out of just becoming an all-in AI writer.
Baier-Lentz: Same answer for me. I went through this entire process over the last six months, where I very liberally designed what I want to do for the next few years. You’re totally right. That’s what you see at generalist firms playing out. There’s a big focus on AI. But even before that, there’s always been a big focus on enterprise versus consumer. It provides more stability. It’s always provided better returns. You have consumer outlier companies like Uber and AirBnB and Spotify, but they’re few and far between.
In my case, sure, I would probably lose some of my competitive edge in terms of visibility, the ability to win deals, anything from sourcing to diligence to convincing founders to take my term sheet over someone else’s. I’d lose some of that if I ventured too far out of my core area, which is gaming and media. But that’s not the core argument. The core argument is, how do you want to spend your life and be truly excellent at something? You can’t do that if you’re not truly passionate about what you’re doing. Yes, I want to be really good, but I also want to work on something that fulfills me, that I enjoy.
I also think there’s just so much white space in gaming and AI. It’s been such a difficult marriage. Games and AI are so intertwined. You mentioned GPUs. Even early game theory, algorithmic design, robotics. There’s so much transfer that happened from games to other technological innovations. Companies like General Intuition take it a step even further, where it’s not just about how AI can make games better. It’s literally about how games can make AI better. To some extent, the game-based data set of Meta now helps us build spatial-temporal models that push the frontier of AI models, period. Not for gaming, but just in general.
GamesBeat: For these advisory relationships you have, it’s interesting that McKinsey, OpenAI, and TBG all value your experience, which includes your knowledge of games. I don’t know if that’s surprising, but maybe it’s reinforcement of this idea that gaming is important.
Baier-Lentz: McKinsey has a TMT practice – tech, media, telecom. They’ve served gaming companies for a long time. TBG similarly invests in growth and late stage capital with their media and tech fund. For OpenAI, this is where we see incumbents moving this year based on the conversations and projects I see. If you run a big games company, it’s really hard to infuse the game-making process with heavy AI right now. It doesn’t always work right. There may also be legal considerations. You can’t just rip everything apart. It’s a bit of a version of the innovator’s dilemma.
But what you can do if you run a big company, you can treat it like any other company in all these other industries that are doing all of this. You look at this and say, “Let’s leave the game aside. What about finance, HR, CRM?” All the stuff a big company does, why not start with those “backend” functions and innovate there? There’s going to be plenty of stuff coming for the game experience too. There’s no way games will be built the way they are today in three years. There’s no way. It might actually look fundamentally different. It’ll at least look quite different.
But carve that out for now and just do all the other stuff. That’s what the big ones are doing. Then the startups can go wild. This is just classic innovator’s dilemma. The big guys are doing it around the edges right now. The startups that have nothing to lose are putting all their chips on innovating with the game and player experience itself. This is what I love. This is where I spend my time. This is where my personal money and time goes. The advisory relationship is also helping the incumbents onboard with these AI transformation projects that are somewhat outside games for the time being, but probably also in games in the next two years.
GamesBeat: What are some interesting VC trends that made you also go in this direction? We notice a trend toward project financing. That’s becoming a lot more popular now, as opposed to equity VC investments. What do those trends tell you about where you need to be?
Baier-Lentz: I’ll be honest. I don’t really know a whole lot about project financing. It’s just not venture investing. Even intellectually it’s just less appealing to me. You want to spend time and energy on things that are N-of-1 style efforts. What are you trying to be? Another Silicon Valley Bank? Just personally I find that less interesting. It might be a smart choice. These companies have thought it through. It would just excite me less personally.
GamesBeat: Is there a model that you think succeeds going forward, versus some of the things people started with ideas that date back to 2019?
Baier-Lentz: So what are the big learnings in gaming VC? One is, after you raise an initial round, how are you going to get the second round done if it’s still a pre-launch round? That was a big holdup. That was maybe not fully thought through when this all started in 2019 and 2020. The assumption was that teams would go about building their game, have something to show, a demo or a prototype, but it really lacks hard metrics. Even in consumer investing, when it gets to a series A after a seed, usually the thing is live. It doesn’t have this massive buildup to create the product. Now you can look at retention metrics and usage and maybe monetization efforts. You just don’t have that for the second round, at least in triple-A PC and console projects. No one wanted to be the fund marking up that other fund. Maybe to a large extent there was also a lot of pride involved. That was a big issue that no one had really thought through. Maybe the biggest.
A lot of projects were also not really VC. What VC is about, it’s finding things that weren’t possible until now. There’s always the question of, “Why now?” If you look at studios, a lot of it is more like, “Me too.” These are “Me too” kinds of efforts. Not doing something fundamentally new that only works today and wasn’t possible two to three years ago, where you’re the only company of that sort. That’s usually venture capital. That’s how you get to small chance, high outcome things. Funding yet another game studio just doesn’t fit that.
Again, I also learned a lot over the last five or six years. We were very active in this space too. But this is one of the realizations from joining Lightspeed, just to see how it actually works. What are the other things we invest in? And then trying to apply that lens to gaming, I think you very quickly arrive at things like General Intuition, Decart–it needs to be something in that category, that really tries to disrupt everything. Most of these won’t work out. That’s venture. But if they do, they can be $5 billion, $10 billion companies.
GamesBeat: What about the related trend, where maybe investments are better made into indie games than triple-A games?
Baier-Lentz: That’s traditional publishing investing. I also don’t get excited about investing in indie games. I just don’t think that’s venture capital. It’s small stuff. If I don’t see a path to something becoming a $5 billion company, a faint light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t want to spend capital and energy there. That doesn’t mean these projects shouldn’t be funded, but there’s different structures. I don’t think that’s venture capital in the traditional sense.
It’s also really hard to scale. Even taking something like an Expedition 33, everyone’s favorite north star–I love the game. I love the team that built it. It’s obviously an awesome story. But even that–it makes good money when it comes out. Then what? Year two, year three, how do we get recurring revenues? How do you build on top of that? Will their next game be as successful? Even something like that is hard to turn into a venture case. We can all agree that it’s one of the greatest indie breakouts in recent history, but even that is frankly not enough, through a classic venture lens.
GamesBeat: What does it mean to have–is your main gig family office investing into games? Or games and AI. Would you go into investments like a limited partner in VC companies? Or would you be very directly investing into companies yourself?
Baier-Lentz: Only direct, and in some cases I also have ways to layer capital on my personal checks to even lead rounds. The biggest check I’ve written so far is $13 million. If it’s a game, if it’s not a technology or a tool or something along the lines of the other names I’ve mentioned–if it’s a game or a game studio making a game, it needs to be a platform of sorts. I’m thinking counter to the current narrative. Again, what can be a $5-10 billion outcome? I think it needs to be something that resembles a consumer platform, rather than just a game.
I’ll give you a good example. I think Gardens is a great example, what they’ll be launching next year. The ambition is to be a third place. They’re making a game that you can’t–it’s not a genre that exists yet. It exists in some ways with GTA role-playing. But it’s a social and scalable experience. You can grow that over time. Also, if it’s games, I would never invest in something that doesn’t have a live ops infrastructure. Again, not in line with what everyone is talking about. I really want small probability shots at big things.
It needs to be cross-platform. It needs to be multiplayer. It needs to be deeply social. It needs to have live ops rails. If any of these are not true, I don’t think it’s investable.
GamesBeat: On the AI side, what’s your investment strategy?
Baier-Lentz: As it relates to games and media, I like anything that’s either in the camp of automating existing game development–again, for lack of better terms, the way engines work today. Either automating engines or building new AI-native engines that look similar, or that rhyme with the ways in which traditional game development happens. Then the other big block is generative and probabilistic models for media creation. Those won’t be a fit to make triple-A games for a long time, and possibly never. But they’re really interesting rendering engines. They can provide interesting, completely new real time media experiences. Decart is a great example of that. Those two together will probably make up about 50% of the portfolio.
GamesBeat: Do you have any regional focus, or other limits you’re putting on it?
Baier-Lentz: I’ll give you something that’ll rattle people. Just to absolutely, abundantly show that I think the narrative needs to be countered, and I could not care less how many people will be offended by what I say. It’s sad that, if you look at the gaming industry and their response to AI, even Hollywood and film have come around to this. Gaming used to be the industry that was technologically ahead of Hollywood. Now it’s inverted. I honestly think that’s quite sick.
Why is that? Well, it’s not like Hollywood is made up of more technologically apt people. Those are certainly working in games. But the truth is, video models have just gotten so good that if you’re working in film, you can’t just point your finger and laugh at it anymore. The greatest example over the years has been Will Smith eating spaghetti. Three years ago it was wonky. It was a mess. Everyone laughed about it. This was in a time where Midjourney images of dogs had five legs. No AI could get fingers right. Look at the latest version of Will Smith eating spaghetti. It’s marvelous. You would no longer be able to differentiate it from something that actually happened in reality. The latest Kling video models–they’re only going to get better. This is the worst they will ever be. I would argue right now that they’re on par already.
The gaming industry laughs about AI slop, shitty games, shitty tools and so on. This is going to be our Will Smith eating spaghetti moment. In two or three years it’s going to look incredibly dumb. There’s no rational argument to be made that it wouldn’t follow the same trajectory. We figured it out for text, images, sound, music, video. Interactive is now where the whole thing stops? It’s harder to construct an argument for why games would be special and not just also follow the same curve as every other media modality than just saying, it’s probably going to be there in three years.
So why not act today? If you don’t, you’ll probably lose your job. If you adopt it, you may keep your job. If there’s one real way today to lose your job, it’s to revolt. Ironically, the revolt is happening because people are afraid for their jobs. Meanwhile, they’re doing the very thing that will probably make them lose their jobs in the next three years. You can print that. I don’t care. If anyone is offended by this, those are probably not the people I’m looking to work with anyway.