4 Major Video Game Brands You Might Not Realize Are Owned By Saudi Arabia

Video game development requires a lot of money. Sometimes a studio can secure its own funding, but often it requires an investment from an outside party, specifically publishers. But publishers are large companies beholden to the whims of their investors. There are times when an entity invests so much in a publisher and owns so much of its stock that it basically owns the company.

The Public Investment Fund (PIF) is a branch of the Saudi Arabian government that has been on the lips of gamers for several years. This wealth fund was started for improving the country's economic portfolio, and it has performed this task by starting companies and investing in others. While the PIF's portfolio covers a wide range of industries and most of these organizations are situated within the Middle East, the PIF has branched out to invest in many foreign companies. In fact, some of the PIF's biggest and most headline-worthy expenditures have revolved around video game studios and publishers. Many of PIF's investments in the gaming space take place through its gaming subsidiary, Savvy Games Group.

We have compiled a list of all the game publishers and other game-affiliated organizations that the PIF owns, organized in order of stock shares. Since Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz serves as PIF's chairman, it is by no means a stretch to say that Saudi Arabia owns these companies. However, given the speed at which the PIF moves, don't be surprised if this article becomes outdated in the near future.

Plenty of studios want to make the next big esports title. You can't ask for better marketing than seeing millions of audience members cheer on a team of professional gamers playing the game you created. While esports championships have been around longer than the PIF, the company created one of the biggest names in that sub-industry.

The Esports World Cup is an annual competition that started in 2024. Each event attracts thousands of players from across the globe, all in the pursuit of fame, glory, and tens of millions of dollars in prizes. Hundreds of millions of viewers tune in for the competition, which spans a wide variety of titles, so the Esports World Cup is by no means small.

While the Esports World Cup has several partners – including Sony, Lenovo Legion, and Secret Lab – the competition is the PIF's brainchild and is part of the country's plan to turn Saudi Arabia into a gaming and esports Mecca. With the exception of 2026, each annual tournament was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (the 2026 cup took place in Paris, France), and organizers plan to return to Riyadh for the 2027 tournament. However, many people have accused the esports cup of being what CNN calls "sportswashing" – using a sporting event to feign a preferable image to distract from potential human rights violations and other issues. These critiques are a running theme among all of the PIF's investments.

EA is a contentious company at the best of times. What else can you expect from the publisher that puts ads even in its most expensive AAA titles? To many audiences, EA is synonymous with the fall of beloved studios such as Visceral ("Dead Space") and Westwood ("Command & Conquer"). EA is also now the face of Saudi Arabia's reach.

On August 4, 2026, EA announced that it had been acquired by the "Consortium" (a partnership between PIF and the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners). According to the BBC, the sale totaled around $55 billion, making it one of the most expensive leveraged buyouts in history. Of course, the PIF only put up $36 billion for the acquisition and borrowed the rest from JPMorgan. But Saudi Arabia won't have to pay back that debt; as per the acquisition agreement, that responsibility falls to EA.

Before the PIF (and the rest of the Consortium) acquired the entirety of EA, Saudi Arabia already had its fingers in EA's pie. The PIF has owned minority stakes in EA for years. Initially, the wealth fund owned 16.01 million shares, but in 2023, that increased to 24.81 million shares. And now a conglomerate with Saudi Arabia at the head owns all the shares. Many gamers were concerned by the acquisition, primarily over how Saudi Arabia would affect EA games going forward. That, and because Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, founded Affinity Partners.

We live in an age of monopolies. Microsoft owns companies such as Zenimax and LinkedIn, while Corsair owns manufacturers like Scuf Gaming and Elgato. Today, the quickest way to amass a catalog of games is to purchase companies that published games and, subsequently, companies that purchased those companies.

In July of 2023, Savvy Games Group finalized its purchase of Scopely for $4.9 billion. Even if you haven't heard of Scopely, you are probably familiar with (and might have played) the games it owns. Most of Scopely's "original" titles are licensed properties turned into mobile games, including "Monopoly Go!," "Scrabble Go," and "Star Trek Fleet Command," and many of these games were developed not by Scopely but by studios it acquired. However, Scopely is perhaps best (or worst) known for its acquisition of one of the most successful mobile studios of all time.

On March 12, 2025, Scopely announced its plans to purchase Niantic, the studio behind "Pokémon GO" and "Monster Hunter Now." The deal was finalized in May of 2025, and Niantic subsequently rebranded as Scopely Explore. Since Savvy Games Group owned Scopely at the time, these titles are now part of Saudi Arabia's gaming ambitions.

Ownership in the legal world is a confusing subject. You don't actually need to acquire a company lock, stock, and barrel to own it; you just need to have a larger stake than everyone else who invested in the organization combined.

As with EA, Saudi has owned shares of SNK (the company best known for the "Fatal Fury" franchise) for several years, just under a different name. In 2020, the Saudi Crown Prince's foundation Electronic Gaming Development Company (EGDC) acquired a 33.3% stake in SNK and signed an agreement that promised it would later increase this to a 51% stake. Fast forward to 2022, and the EGDC bought enough SNK stock to own over 96% of the company, effectively turning the EGDC into SNK's owner.

This particular purchase marked the first time the EGDC — and, by extension, Saudi Arabia — acquired a foreign game studio. When VGC asked SNK to comment on the event, the company's main producer and designer, Yasuyuki Oda, promised that SNK still had "full freedom" in creative aspects, although audiences have protested in response, usually in the form of boycotting SNK games and any streams associated with SNK properties. However, this has not stopped Capcom from adding the main face of "Fatal Fury," Mai Shiranui, as a guest DLC character in "Street Fighter 6."

Increasing stock ownership percentage is a running theme among Saudi Arabia's game studio purchases. First, the fund dips its toes into these companies by purchasing minority stakes. Then a few years later, it dives headlong into ownership. While the PIF has yet to announce any more major developer purchases at the time of writing, Saudi Arabia still has its hand in several major stock libraries.

Arguably the most important purchase in Saudi Arabia's portfolio is a fraction of Nintendo. In 2022, the PIF bought 5% of Nintendo's shares, which was later increased to 8.26% in 2023, but now sits close to 4.23%, at the time of writing. While this partial ownership is a pittance compared to Saudi Arabia's other purchases, it still makes the PIF Nintendo's largest outside stakeholder. Earlier in 2026, the EGDC bought 5.03% of Capcom's shares, while the PIF transferred its 11 million shares of Take-Two Interactive to Savvy Games Group, showing Saudi's aggressive push into gaming.

The above investments are only a sampling of the companies the PIF is, well, investing in, but these aren't the only methods Saudi Arabia is using to stuff its economic portfolio. While not a monetary investment in the same sense, Roblox is partnering with Saudi Arabia to set up a new regional headquarters in Riyadh, primarily to support Saudi Arabia's creative community. Given Roblox's recent partnership with Savvy Games Group to transform the game "Roblox" into an educational tool for Saudi students, don't be surprised if the PIF purchases shares of Roblox (and later acquires the company) in the near future.