World of Warcraft is one of the most successful video games of all time. Launched in 2004, the high fantasy online roleplaying game boasted 12 million subscribers worldwide at its height; has generated billions of dollars in subscriptions, expansion sales, in-game purchases and services; and still has an active player base in the millions. Its developer is Blizzard Entertainment, one of the most storied names in the industry. The game broke through into mainstream culture, generating countless memes and even spawning its very own feature film and South Park episode.
Every six months or so, a new season of World of Warcraft launches and, with it, an event called the Race to World First, where the game’s top guilds in North America and Europe compete to overcome the hardest challenges in the game in an esports event that draws hundreds of thousands of viewers on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
The event itself is popular with the Warcraft community but has little impact or resonance outside of it, its viewership dwarfed by that of other popular games like League of Legends that will pull in millions of viewers during global competitions.
During the latest Race to World First events in the winter and spring, a name popped up on the stream that I had only heard of in the context of Vision 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s much-vaunted project for modernizing the Saudi economy. Overlaid on some of the top Twitch streams was the name Qiddiya and its slogan, “Play Life.”
Billed in official material as a “futuristic city comprising a mix of high-energy entertainment attractions, sports complexes, cultural landmarks and residential neighbourhoods,” Qiddiya City is expected to house half a million people and serve as an entertainment and esports hub for the kingdom, with theme parks — including a local edition of Six Flags — art installations and esports venues able to accommodate 78,000 people.
Nestled in the Tuwaiq Mountains, 25 miles from downtown Riyadh, the location, Saudi Arabia evidently hopes, will attract visitors and tourists as well as the broader video game industry, with companies establishing bases there, diversifying the country’s economy and creating jobs as part of its broader economic overhaul.
While work in Qiddiya continues, though, Saudi Arabia is hosting another major gaming event this summer — the Esports World Cup (EWC), which runs from July 8 to August 24. Over 2,000 players are expected to take part in the competition, which features an eye-watering $70 million prize pool, the largest in the history of esports, and it will take part in Boulevard City, an entertainment district in the capital. The event will play a crucial role in establishing Saudi Arabia as a key player in a world of entertainment unlike any that the Gulf states have traditionally dabbled in.
The global video game industry already dwarfs other entertainment forms. The consultancy Bain & Company projects that global revenue from video games will reach $257 billion by 2028, up from $196 billion in 2023. Grand Theft Auto V, a video game set in Los Angeles in which players are essentially the protagonists in a crime drama, is one of the most successful entertainment products of all time, having generated over $7 billion in revenue by some estimates. By comparison, “Barbie,” 2023’s most popular movie, generated $1.4 billion in global box office sales.
It is perhaps tempting to chalk up the Saudi foray into the industry as typical Gulf state bravado, throwing increasingly absurd sums of money at an industry for sheer clout (see Cristiano Ronaldo and other Saudi soccer club acquisitions), but between minor sponsorship deals with World of Warcraft guilds and a megacity in the desert built to host computer game competitions is a deeper strategy that will give the kingdom a seat at the table in one of the fastest growing and most influential entertainment sectors in the world.
Enter the Savvy Games Group, an unassuming name for a company whose chairperson is none other than the Saudi crown prince and whose board includes Yasir al-Rumayan, the head of the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, valued at around $925 billion.
Savvy is a subsidiary of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and was established as a vehicle for Saudi investments in the video game industry (it estimates that over 70% of Saudis are gamers, and almost half of these gamers are women). It is led by Brian Ward, a well-known video game industry figure and a former senior executive at Activision Blizzard, one of the largest video game publishers in the world.
Back in 2022, Savvy said it would invest $38 billion in the gaming industry. In 2023, it acquired Scopely, one of the most profitable mobile gaming companies in the world, for nearly $5 billion, along with a number of major esports organizations. Some of these acquisitions have already generated significant revenue for the kingdom — Scopely’s Monopoly Go! game made over $2.4 billion in revenue in 2024 alone.
Independently of Savvy Games Group, the Public Investment Fund also owns large minority stakes in some of the largest video game publishers in the world. In 2023, it doubled its stake in Electronic Arts, the creators of the FIFA and NFL video game franchises, to nearly $3 billion worth of shares — or 9%. It also owns shares in Activision Blizzard, the publisher of the Call of Duty series and World of Warcraft, and Take Two Interactive, which publishes Grand Theft Auto.
As of October 2024, the fund owned 7.5% of Japanese games giant Nintendo and 6.6% of Capcom, the creators of the Street Fighter and Resident Evil franchises.
These investments aren’t as flashy as the acquisition of top Premier League clubs like Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, or even storied but staid shopping centers — they’re buried in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and Nikkei press releases. But perhaps putting all of this in numbers is beside the point (they certainly make my eyes glaze over a bit).
Taken together, these investments give Saudi Arabia a stake in some of the largest and most successful video game franchises in the world — investments that appear to be strategic and highly likely to pay off. The kingdom has poured money into a series of companies that, between them, are responsible for franchises that are considered cultural touchstones for many people in my generation who grew up with (and continue to partake in) video games.
Perhaps you were a Nintendo fan who spent an inordinate number of hours playing Legend of Zelda or guiding the world’s least dependable plumber, Mario, through endless mazes and cart races. Maybe you have fond memories of late-night bouts of FIFA matches on your PlayStation with a sibling that ended in angry controllers thrown across the room, or of laughing with a friend after executing a perfect headshot in Call of Duty, or of finding satisfaction in perfecting your defensive lines in the StarCraft and Red Alert strategy games.
Now Saudi Arabia owns a significant chunk of the companies responsible for these video games. Why? And what does it mean?
Growing up in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia was perhaps the most potent symbol of anti-fun. I don’t mean fun here in a transient and hedonistic, even trivial, sense, but as a profound value that gives joy to humans’ day-to-day existence. H. L. Mencken said it best: “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s in Dubai, with Egyptian parents, the sonorous declarations of Saudi imams and preachers often echoed on cassette tapes that featured recitations of the Quran, stories from Islamic history and the etiquette of day-to-day behavior and dress codes. The Second Intifada, 9/11 and the Iraq war were particularly charged periods emotionally, touchstones on the road to Arab and Muslim victimhood, and solace was in short supply except for the retreat into the certainty of faith.
It was the diktats of the run-of-the-mill mosque imams, influenced by the directives of the ultraconservative clerics in Saudi Arabia, that had a more visible impact on everyday life. Intrusive and pointless fatwas determined everything from which foot you used to step into a bathroom, to how to supposedly emulate the Prophet Muhammad by wearing thobes that stopped at the shins because flowing robes signalled pride, to a prohibition on music because of how it sways and corrupts the soul. The niqab became commonplace (my mother wore one), turning into a fixture that I saw on my travels from Lebanon to Morocco, an import transposed out of its desert culture milieu. Men sported long, scraggly beards and shaved their mustaches, again because they were told it emulated Muhammad.
I did follow some of those edicts for a time, not fully grasping that God wasn’t such a micromanager that the exact length of my jeans mattered, but eventually abandoned the effort because it was too onerous and unfashionable. At any rate, it felt odd that we were engrossed in discussing the imperative of walking into a restroom with your left foot instead of the right while researchers in the West were sequencing the genome, and as far as I knew, their exact beard or mustache structure did not affect their abilities.
During that time, I found a lot of solace in video games. Like many young men my age, I had grown up playing games on Atari and Nintendo consoles. Slaying dragons and fire elementals in World of Warcraft, exploring the high fantasy settings of the Elder Scrolls series or reliving the battle of Stalingrad in Call of Duty were suitable escapes from the drudgery of daily life interspersed with the violent images from Iraq. Video games occupied a curious societal role: They were the source of endless lamentation by adults because they were a waste of time, but as long as you did your daily prayers, it wasn’t sinful per se (naturally the adults were unaware of mechanics like hiring prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto).
A few years ago, one of the vaunted Saudi clerics who became absurdly popular in those days (he still has over 20 million followers on X) apologized for the harshness with which they preached religious values and jurisprudence. His name was Ayed al-Qarni, and the conversion was not a religious or spiritual one, at least not outwardly. It was a result of Crown Prince Mohammed cracking down on the religious establishment and bringing to heel the famous Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
In May 2019, during an interview with Saudi TV, Qarni said: “I apologise in the name of the Sahwa to the Saudi society for the mistakes that were not related to Islam and for the extreme fatwas. … Our religion is a religion of peace, safety and mercy. Thanks to God, we discovered this in the texts and interpretations of our scholars. … You cannot compare my ideas that I had when I was only 24 or 26 years old to my current thoughts. … I apologize to Saudi society for the mistakes that have contradicted the Quran and Sunnah and contradicted the tolerance of Islam, a moderate religion. I am today supportive of moderate Islam, open to the world, which has been called for by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”
Better late than never, I suppose. But who will fill in the two decades’ worth of photo albums that don’t have our mothers in them because a Saudi cleric declared their faces were to be hidden and obscured?
Why is Saudi Arabia investing so heavily in the video game industry? There might be a deeper philosophical reason, but it’s clear that at least part of it is simply that it makes business sense. The industry is rapidly growing, is more influential among young men (and women) than television and film and has a great return on investment, particularly in insanely profitable mobile gaming and the reliable workhorse franchises of the industry. It’s a great avenue for income diversification in an economy weaning itself from oil, and it will create jobs.
It’s also cool, hip and modern, and is an easy win with a young population that enjoys video games (remember those Savvy estimates from earlier). Who would have imagined Riyadh hosting high-tempo League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients (two very popular online games) matches in a massive arena with millions of dollars on the line, streamed and broadcast on computers around the world and watched by rabid video game fans? It’s giving the people what they want in a fundamental sense, in the same vein as Saudi Arabia’s efforts organizing crowd-pleasing UFC matches.
Video games are also Western-focused, or at least are likely to draw Western audiences to the kingdom. The theme parks and competitions are an excellent way to draw other wealthy Gulf residents away from their entertainment playgrounds in nearby Dubai, and offer venues for young people in the kingdom to go to without consuming alcohol (if only our parents who thought video games were a waste of time could see us now).
Human rights activists may argue that this is a form of “sportswashing,” of redirecting attention from human rights issues and abuses toward the kingdom’s more positive contributions in cultural spaces. I personally don’t subscribe to such notions, mostly because I don’t think that, in the current global environment, human rights records have any influence on policy. Otherwise, America would have imposed sanctions on Israel, the European Union would have imposed sanctions on America and on itself and we’d all be barrelling toward clean energy initiatives to wean ourselves off oil.
Also, Arab states tend to enjoy the lion’s share of sportswashing critiques when they can apply to anything. Is America filmwashing its abysmal human rights record under Donald Trump by releasing the final edition of “Mission Impossible” and unleashing the charms of Tom Cruise on an unsuspecting world?
In addition, as I said earlier, these aren’t events announced with great aplomb in a massive ceremony, against the backdrop of the largest fireworks show in the world, in front of the tallest building in the world, ahead of breaking ground on constructing the largest biryani dish in the world. It is a development that, while massive, is unfolding in SEC filings and stock market press releases, with potentially enormous return on investment. It’s probably not simply because the crown prince, who told Fox News a couple of years ago that he was an avid fan of Call of Duty, often played games in his childhood to blow off steam (though who knows).
Either way, Saudi Arabia is deliberately and strategically investing in video games, a position that will give it some influence over the direction that a key facet of modern culture is headed in, a medium that many find meaningful and look upon with affection. It is also a potentially radical shift in the way the kingdom exerts soft power and in its impact on the cultural and religious zeitgeist of the region.
What it will do with that power is anybody’s guess.
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