Saudi Arabia to invest nearly $40 billion in video games

Ces derniers mois, le groupe Savvy Gaming Group s'est montré très actif sur le marché des jeux vidéo en pleine consolidation.

Posted Sep 29, 2022, 7:34 PM

Saudi Arabia’s investments in video games to date were therefore only a warm-up. Savvy Gaming Group, owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), has announced that it will invest nearly $37.8 billion in the video game industry, according to the news agency. official SPA.

In detail, 18.6 billion will be allocated to minority stakes in game developers and publishers. In addition, 13.3 billion will be specifically devoted to the acquisition of a “leading game publisher” and the rest will allow the firm to take stakes in start-ups in the sector as well as in development structures. e-sport.

“Savvy Games Group is one part of our ambitious strategy to make Saudi Arabia the ultimate global gaming and esports hub by 2030,” said Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – who endorses all significant investments made by the PIF – reports the official SPA news agency. With recurring liquidity (oil windfall, sale of some of the shares it holds in Aramco), the PIF increased its holdings in Meta, or PayPal and launched new investments in Amazon, Alphabet, Starbucks, JP Morgan and BlackRock.

Multiple equity investments

At the same time, the Savvy Gaming Group has also been very active in the consolidating video game market. In January, the structure – which had already taken shares in the American giants Activision, Electronic Arts and Take-Two in 2021 for a total amount of 3 billion dollars -, thus got its hands on ESL Gaming, a heavyweight of the organization of e-sport tournaments as well as on FACEIT, an online match platform, for the cumulative sum of 1.5 billion dollars. A historic record on the scale of the e-sports market.

The group then took 5% stakes in Nintendo (for 3 billion dollars) as well as in the Japanese company Capcom and the South Korean firm Nexon, for a ticket of 1 billion dollars for these two transactions. Savvy Gaming Group has also acquired, almost entirely, the Japanese developer SNK. In Europe, he also set foot at Embracer – the first market capitalization of video games on the Old Continent -, taking 8.1% of the shares, against a check for 1 billion dollars.

At the head of Savvy Gaming Group, Saudi Arabia has placed Brian Ward, a former head of the international studios of Activision Blizzard which was bought nearly 70 billion dollars by Microsoft at the beginning of the year. . “We are expected to be more than an active investor,” he said recently. to the “Venture Beat” website specifying that Savvy Gaming Group was not intended to be a “passive fund”.

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