Saudi Arabia is playing more and more: the goal is a 38 billion gaming hub

6 April 20231 year ago babelfish

Saudi Arabia continues to make billionaire shopping in the world of video games: Mohammad bin Salman intends to create a real gaming hub capable of competing with the USA, China and Japan. And he bought a software house in Los Angeles for about 5 billion

If the automotive world veers towards oil, Saudi Arabia must diversify its investments: it is too dangerous to have an economy based solely on oil. Among the sectors that can be colonized is that of video games, in which a new actor, China, has already established itself, albeit with some difficulties mainly due to the love and hate relationship shown by the government towards the medium (blocked several times at home). the historic partition of the USA and Japan .

SHOPPING IN HISTORIC SOFTWARE HOUSES

At the beginning of 2023, Saudi Arabia had acquired new shares in some of the major existing companies: Nintendo, known for Super Mario and Zelda , as well as a producer of proprietary platforms (the latest, the Switch, has placed something like 110 million unit), EA famous above all for sports titles (it has recently lost its Fifa license) and Take-Two, which among the numerous IPs owes its fortune above all to GTA and Red Dead Redemption .

In Nintendo, Saudi Arabia had first raised its stake to more than 7%, then the public investment fund (PIF), largely controlled by Prince Mohammed bin Salman , reached 8.26%, placing itself at made as Nintendo's largest overseas shareholder.

On the US front, the PIF also recently increased the shares of EA and Take-Two to 5.8% of Electronic Arts, a small but significant jump from the 5.1% previously held and 6.8% of the shares of T2, where it started from 5.3%.

A 38 BILLION GAMING HUB IN SAUDI ARABIA

Savvy Gaming Group , also founded by Bin Salman , now intends to become a video game publisher, as stated by CEO Brian Ward (formerly of Activision Blizzard); “We are currently more of an esports company than a gaming company. What we're going to do this year is focus more on game publishing and development. We would like to use these investments to start working with those companies and ask how we can collaborate to publish in the Middle East and North Africa, manage their esports business and jointly develop new intellectual properties.” In 2022 it acquired the export realities ESL and Face It for 1.5 billion dollars. The goal, declared on several occasions, is to attract more and more talents and companies to the Saudi kingdom.

THE LAST PURCHASE

In the past few hours, the list of acquired companies has lengthened: for a total of 4.9 billion dollars, the giant has been awarded Scopely , an American software house founded in 2011 in Los Angeles, famous for its mobile titles such as Yahtzee With Buddies, Star Trek Fleet Command, Marvel Strike Force, Stumble Guys and Scrabble Go .

"Scopely is one of the fastest growing gaming companies and we have long admired its ability to build a community of gamers," Ward said. In 2020 Scopely closed a $340 million round at a $3.3 billion post-money valuation.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/larabia-saudita-giochicchia-sempre-piu-obiettivo-un-gaming-hub-da-38-miliardi/ on Thu, 06 Apr 2023 12:57:41 +0000.