Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is considering combining Electronic Arts with its wholly owned Savvy Games Group, potentially transforming years of multibillion-dollar acquisitions into one of the world’s largest integrated gaming businesses.
The discussions remain preliminary and no final decision has been taken. Any combination is also unlikely to proceed before Savvy completes its planned acquisition of Chinese mobile-games developer Moonton, according to reports on the deliberations.
The transaction would be less a conventional takeover than a consolidation of gaming assets already predominantly controlled by PIF.
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund holds about 93% of Electronic Arts following the US publisher’s $55bn take-private by a consortium comprising PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, completed in August. Savvy, meanwhile, is wholly owned by PIF.
That ownership structure gives Riyadh a potential route to place some of the industry’s most valuable franchises and businesses within a more unified corporate platform.
EA brings EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, Battlefield, The Sims and Apex Legends, alongside a substantial global console and PC publishing operation. Savvy controls mobile publisher Scopely and esports operator ESL FACEIT Group.
Savvy acquired Scopely for $4.9bn in 2023. Scopely subsequently bought Niantic’s games business for $3.5bn, adding Pokémon GO, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom to a mobile portfolio that already includes the highly successful Monopoly GO!.
A completed acquisition of Moonton, best known for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, would add another major mobile franchise and strengthen Savvy’s presence in Asian markets.
Bringing these businesses together would create a group spanning console and PC publishing, mobile games, live-service franchises and esports. It could also provide greater scope to coordinate technology investment, game distribution, player acquisition and marketing across businesses that have largely expanded separately.
The potential merger consequently points to an evolution in Saudi Arabia’s gaming strategy.
PIF initially built its position through minority investments and acquisitions across publishers, developers and esports businesses. The EA transaction dramatically increased that exposure. Consolidating EA with Savvy would shift the emphasis from accumulating assets towards determining how those holdings can operate together at global scale.
The move also fits Saudi Arabia’s wider National Gaming and Esports Strategy, which targets more than SAR50bn ($13.3bn) in annual direct and indirect economic contribution and 39,000 jobs by 2030, while seeking to establish the Kingdom as a significant international gaming and esports centre.
Execution, however, remains complex.
Savvy must first complete the proposed Moonton transaction, while any EA combination would have to accommodate the minority holdings of Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. The eventual structure could also face regulatory examination across several jurisdictions, depending on the degree of integration between publishing, mobile gaming and esports assets.
For PIF, the strategic test is therefore changing. Saudi Arabia has already demonstrated its capacity to acquire major global gaming assets; an EA-Savvy combination would test whether those investments can be integrated into a coherent international operating group.
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