Saudi Arabia’s plan to become the crown prince of gaming

theverge.com:

You could call it the summer that Saudi Arabia swallowed sports. On June 6th, news broke that Saudi-backed LIV Golf was merging with the Professional Golfers’ Association, funded to the tune of over a billion dollars by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). In soccer, the world’s most popular and lucrative sport, the kingdom has brought global superstars such as Karim Benzema, Neymar, and Jordan Henderson to the desert to play their trade, laboring not only under the region’s sweltering heat but virulent criticisms of sportswashing. For established institutions, it was a summer of humbling disruption in which they had perhaps quietly sensed, for they would never admit it, the dawning of a new world order. 

The spending spree isn’t limited to sports. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has invested in movies, establishing the Red Sea International Film Festival. The country hosts — in what feels like the final boss of late-stage capitalism — pay-per-view WWE events. Then there are video games, a global industry worth $187 billion that the kingdom is intent on muscling its way into, but with perhaps not quite the equivalent, naked levels of aggression that it has shown toward sports.

The minority investments are stacking up now: Nintendo, Take-Two, EA, Activision Blizzard. These are significant pieces of some of the industry’s most profitable pies. Through the PIF-funded Savvy Games Group (which declined to be interviewed for the piece), the kingdom has acquired mobile developer Scopely for $4.9 billion and esports organizations ESL and Faceit for $1.5 billion. A further $13 billion has been earmarked “for the acquisition and development of a leading game publisher” with many more billions reserved for further minority