The Saudi Sovereign Fund, through Savvy Games Group, continues to expand its gaming empire. After announce the purchase of Electronic Arts for $50 billionis now negotiating to acquire Moonton Technology for a price that could reach 7 billion, consolidating its dominance in the lucrative mobile gaming market.
The purchase. Just four months after announcing the purchase of EA, Saudi Arabia returns to the negotiating table. This time the target is Moonton Technology, the developer of ‘Mobile Legends: Bang Bang‘, one of the most successful mobile MOBAs on the planet. Savvy Games Group, subsidiary of the Saudi Sovereign Fund, is finalizing an operation valued between 6,000 and 7,000 million dollars to acquire the studio, currently owned by ByteDancethe parent company of TikTok.
The strategy. The figure may seem modest compared to EA’s mega purchase, but it accurately reflects the strategic value of the Asian mobile market. Mobile Legends has accumulated more than a billion global downloads and dominates Southeast Asia, where it has managed to capitalize on a massive player base despite having faced multiple Riot Games legal lawsuits for violation of the intellectual property of ‘League of Legends’. The sentences forced Moonton to pay million-dollar compensation, but did not stop its growth in territories where access to consoles and PCs is limited.
Why the mobile? Observers who believe that the mobile market is not what it was in the days of ‘Angry Birds’ are wrong: The sector generated more revenue in 2025 than PC and consoles combinedwith the model free-to-play demonstrating enormous profitability. ‘Monopoly GO‘, developed by Scopely (also Saudi owned since 2023), has generated approximately 6 billion dollars since its launch. A single application whose billing alone covers the price of Moonton. This equation explains why the kingdom looks with such interest towards mobile gaming: the relationship between initial investment and potential return far exceeds that of traditional AAA blockbusters.
Controlling cell phones. With Moonton under its control, Saudi Arabia would manage three of the most lucrative mobile developers in the world (along with Scopely and the division gaming of Niantic), positioning itself as a dominant player in a segment where until now the Chinese Tencent exercised almost absolute hegemony. The operation could be closed during this first quarter of 2026, consolidating a movement that began as economic diversification and evolves towards something much more ambitious: the vertical control of entire segments of the video game industry.
And more than mobile phones. The Saudi Sovereign Fund’s investment catalog in the video game industry draws a control map that encompasses SNK (‘The King of Fighters’, ‘Metal Slug’), Scopely (‘Monopoly GO’, ‘Star Trek Fleet Command’), Niantic’s gaming division (‘Peridot’, ‘Monster Hunter Now’) and ESL FaceIt Group (the largest organizer of esports competitions in the world). Five companies that alone generate billions annually and, above all, cover completely different markets.
The power of actions. But the true dimension of Saudi power is revealed when its shareholding is analyzed. The fund maintains between 5% and 10% of shares at Nintendo, Koei Tecmo, Embracer Group, Nexon, Capcom, Take-Two Interactive, NCSoft, Square Enix and Bandai Namco. They are not testimonial investments: in several cases it is the second or third largest shareholder after the founders or traditional Japanese funds. This gives it influence on boards of directors, veto power over strategic decisions and privileged access to sensitive corporate information.
At Ubisoft and Microsoft. The links with Ubisoft and Microsoft are more opaque. There is a 2022 agreement after which Savvy acquired minority stakes in Ubi as the Guillemot family fought hostile takeover attempts by activist investors, but the exact terms of the pact were never made public. With Microsoft, the relationship transcends the purely financial: Saudi Arabia has maintained investments in the technology matrix since 2016 and collaborates with Xbox on server infrastructure for the Middle East.
Leaving Tencent behind. At the time, Tencent’s strategy generated regulatory alarms in the West due to concentration of power, but the Saudi approach is more aggressive in a key aspect: while the Chinese company sought majority stakes that would give it operational control but respected brands and structures, the kingdom has absolute ownership of medium-sized studios and also strategic stakes in consolidated giants.
This hybridization allows for vertical influence without triggering antitrust alerts. The European Commission investigated for 18 months Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but authorities have not publicly questioned that a single actor controls significant stakes in nine of the twenty publishers largest in the world while directly owning three mobile developers that bill more than $10 billion annually combined. With the imminent incorporation of EA and Moonton, Saudi Arabia will have spent more than 70 billion dollars on gaming from 2021. To put it in perspective: that figure exceeds the current market value of Ubisoft, Capcom and Square Enix combined.
A future of acquisitions. It is an entire recreational empire that could increase in the future: it is less supervised by regulatory authorities than other sectors and, for the moment, it has a very wide margin for growth. Few acquisitions comparable in magnitude remain in the pipeline, but the project Saudi Vision 2030which wants to diversify the country’s economy so as not to depend so much on oil, makes the nation look to the future. And this is a very financially attractive future.
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