Consumer VC: Venture Capital I B2C Startups I Commerce | Early-Stage Investing · Mike Gelb

What’s Next in Gaming? Exploring Game Economies, VR, and AI Technologies with Brian Cho, Co-Founder and General Partner at Patron

·56 min·5 clips

Mike Gelb opens with Brian Cho's path from Riot Games and A16Z into Patron. Patron is described as an early stage firm that invests in the future shaped by games. The conversation starts with a basic problem: how do games make money without making the player experience worse? Cho revisits the free to play era and the companies that treated users as long term players instead of short term transactions. He points to Riot as the clearest example of that mindset. League of Legends was built so people could play for free for as long as they wanted. Optional skins sat on top of that experience instead of blocking access to the game itself. That approach, he argues, helped build one of the most profitable and highly engaged businesses in the category. Mike keeps pressing on what that means for today's wave of game monetization. Cho's answer stays centered on sustainability. He prefers business models that add value for players instead of acting like a casino. The discussion then turns to blockchain. Cho does not treat crypto as automatically useful. He is much more interested in whether it can support a better user experience. The guest and host also touch on generative AI. The point is not novelty for its own sake. It is whether AI can change how games are built, operated, or experienced in a way that lasts. The conversation keeps circling back to engagement as the real test. Mike reflects that this is less about squeezing revenue and more about understanding audience behavior over time. Cho's perspective comes from both operating inside a major game company and investing from the venture side. That mix gives the episode a practical feel even when the topic gets forward-looking. The result is a broad but coherent look at the next chapter of gaming.

As heard by us

A clear look at gaming as a business model, not just a category.

Brian Cho frames gaming as a business model, linking games, generative AI, and blockchain to how people play and pay. The strongest stretch stays on game economics: long-term engagement, optional monetization, and the difference between building for players and squeezing them…

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Why you'd press play

You want the gaming thesis behind games, generative AI, and the next business-model shift.

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