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Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is planning to transfer its gaming stocks to its subsidiary Savvy Games Group, while remaining as a collaborative partner, according to a report by Japan’s Nikkei.
The transfer, scheduled for 2025, will allow PIF to leverage intellectual property across the Middle East as part of a wider strategy to diversify the kingdom’s economy to include entertainment revenue from gaming and esports, Nikkei reported.
Saudi Arabia’s PIF-backed Savvy Games Group, which announced a $37.8 billion investment plan in 2022 to transform the kingdom into one of the biggest gaming hubs in the world, has been involved in a flurry of deal making, with the largest being the $4.9 billion acquisition in 2023 of Scopely, a leading mobile-first game developer and publisher.
PIF is also the biggest foreign shareholder in Japan’s Nintendo with an 8.26% in the gaming company, along with a 6.6% stake in the Japan-based game developer Koei Tecmo.
Other major acquisitions in 2023 included a $265 million investment in VSPO, the leading Chinese esports company, increasing its exposure to the Asia-Pacific esports market, followed by the EFG acquisition of Vindex, a leading esports infrastructure platform.
In its gaming report last week, Savvy CEO Brian Ward stated the company now has “an estimated 40% share of the global esports market, putting us in a strong position to drive the positive growth and development of the sector in the coming years.”
(Writing by Bindu Rai, editing by Seban Scaria)