In early 2022, Savvy Games Group was little more than a newly formed vehicle inside Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), armed with a $38 billion war chest and a promise to spend it. Now, four years later, it controls Scopely, ESL FACEIT Group, Steer Studios, and (pending close) Moonton, while also stewarding billions of dollars in listed gaming stakes across Japan, Korea, and the U.S.
It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when the deals are reported one by one. Taken together, they point to something more deliberate: Savvy is becoming PIF’s gaming holding company, and the acquisition phase is nearing its end.
The way Savvy structures itself is quite simple. Scopely is where Savvy is building its mobile games business; ESL FACEIT Group gives it a major position in esports; and Steer is Savvy’s attempt to build production capacity at home in Saudi Arabia. Finally, the stakes in listed companies put Savvy in charge of PIF’s exposure to many of the industry’s biggest companies.
The outlier is Electronic Arts. PIF helped take EA private last year, but not through Savvy. That is probably the point: EA is too large and too American to be presented as another Savvy acquisition. Silver Lake and Affinity Partners provided the distance and political cover it needed.
The House Monopoly Go Built
Savvy’s first big move was in esports. By the time the company publicly launched in early 2022, the $1.5 billion ESL-FACEIT merger was already underway, and the company had set aside $13 billion to acquire a major publisher. The message was clear from the start: Savvy was not going to build its way into games slowly. It was going to buy its way in.
In 2023, Savvy acquired Scopely for $4.9 billion. At the time, the price invited skepticism as Scopely’s mobile revenue had been declining, and the market had turned against expensive gaming deals. But Savvy’s timing was almost comically fortunate. Monopoly Go launched in April 2023, three months before the acquisition closed, and quickly became one of the biggest mobile games ever. By November 2023, it had passed $1 billion in revenue. By the end of 2025, Sensor Tower estimated the game had generated $6 billion in lifetime in-app purchase revenue and was still generating roughly $200 million a month.
Monopoly Go changed what Scopely was inside Savvy. It stopped looking like the publisher Savvy had bought and started looking like the machine Savvy could use to buy more. Further acquisitions in mobile followed:
- In March 2025, Scopely signed a $3.5 billion deal for Niantic’s games business, bringing in Pokémon Go, more than 30 million monthly active players, and over 400 employees. The deal closed in May.
- In February 2026, Scopely agreed to acquire a majority stake in Istanbul-based Loom Games, with a path to full ownership.
- In March 2026, Savvy agreed to acquire Moonton from ByteDance in a deal pending closure for more than $6 billion, adding another major mobile asset and deeper exposure to Southeast Asian esports. Notably, Moonton is being acquired by Savvy directly rather than by Scopely. This suggests that Savvy may run it as a fourth standalone operating asset alongside Scopely, EFG, and Steer rather than folding it into Scopely’s mobile stack.
Meanwhile, PIF has started to consolidate its other gaming assets under Savvy as well. In January 2026, PIF reportedly transferred roughly $12 billion of listed gaming stakes to Savvy, including positions in Nintendo, Bandai Namco, Koei Tecmo, NCSoft, Nexon, and Square Enix. PIF’s Take-Two stake already sat under Savvy through a wholly owned subsidiary.
By now, Savvy has moved well beyond its original publisher acquisition frame. It now has more than $17 billion in disclosed acquisition spending since 2022, another $12 billion in transferred listed stakes, and additional exposure through existing holdings in companies such as Embracer.
Does It Add Up?
Hard performance data is thin. Savvy and Scopely are both private companies, and the disclosures are PR-friendly milestones instead of audited financials. The one part we can actually price is the listed stakes side, and it does not look great. PIF built up most of its non-U.S. gaming positions in 2022, when gaming stocks were near their highs, and they have mostly stayed flat or fallen since while the broader market climbed.
Profitability was never really the point, though. PIF measures these bets in scale and prestige, and on those terms the Scopely acquisition looks like one of the better large gaming deals of the decade. By March 2026, Scopely said it had surpassed $15 billion in lifetime revenue, two billion lifetime downloads, and six billion-dollar-plus franchises across more than 3,000 employees in 30-plus countries. Savvy reported it had finished 2024 as the world's eighth-largest games publisher by net revenue, with Scopely the main driver.
What's more interesting is the role Scopely has been given. Savvy seems to have tasked it with buying big. The $3.5 billion Niantic deal is the obvious example. Loom is the subtler one. New mobile games that generate $1 million-plus per day in IAP are rare. Scopely identified the genre leader in the sort-puzzle category and locked up a majority stake before the broader market priced it in. That is an operating capability, not just a checkbook. It also explains why Savvy has been comfortable letting Scopely run its own M&A: it's clearly better at it than most.
Moonton, if it closes, fills a real gap. Scopely's portfolio is heavily Western and barely touches Southeast Asia, one of the few mobile markets still growing meaningfully. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) is the dominant MOBA across Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Revenue data is hard to come by as in-app revenue tracked by app analytics services does not include third-party Android stores. We do know, though, that according to Sensor Tower, tracked app store revenue fell from net $300 million to net $270 million from 2024 to 2025. ByteDance paid roughly $4 billion for Moonton in 2021. Tracked revenue has been roughly flat to declining since, yet Savvy is reportedly paying $6 billion-plus.
Savvy likely justifies the hefty premium through esports. MLBB is one of the largest mobile esports properties in the world. The M7 World Championship in January 2026 drew over five million peak concurrent viewers, making it the most-watched mobile esports event ever recorded. The game is already an inaugural title for the Esports World Cup and the upcoming Esports Nations Cup in Riyadh in late 2026, both Saudi-hosted. Buying Moonton means PIF would own one of the marquee competitive properties of the tournaments its other vehicles already host and slot a flagship mobile esport's title into ESL FACEIT Group.
Savvy’s End Game
The acquisition phase looks close to complete. Once Moonton closes, the $38 billion commitment is largely deployed, and the EA deal (although it was structured outside Savvy) pulls PIF's broader gaming allocation past that mark. Whether PIF tops Savvy up with fresh capital is unknowable from the outside. Savvy CEO Brian Ward continues to say the strategy has not changed and that Savvy will keep hunting — although there is not another Scopely-sized publisher left to buy that Savvy doesn't already own a piece of, and the obvious targets are gone. What "keep hunting" probably means now is smaller and less visible: tuck-in studios under Scopely, additional minority stakes in listed publishers, and acqui-hires of the sort that do not generate billion-dollar headlines. The next phase will look different from the last one, whether Savvy frames it that way or not.
What it is for is increasingly clear, and it is not only financial returns. Saudi Arabia's gaming push sits inside Vision 2030, the broader effort to build influence and entertainment infrastructure beyond oil. The EA deal makes this explicit: a $20 billion debt load and modest growth prospects don't pencil out as a pure investment but rather as soft power, with EA Sports FC as the crown jewel.
Savvy's operating empire serves a similar logic at a different scale. Scopely keeps the cash flowing and the global reach plausible; EFG puts esports events where Saudi Arabia wants them; Steer and Mirai are the domestic capacity plays. The stakes in publicly listed companies provide influence at the cap table of a wide array of major Japanese, Korean, European, and U.S. publishers.
There's plenty that could go wrong. First, one sovereign-owned vehicle now holds gaming exposure across the U.S., China, Korea, Japan, and the Gulf at once. That is a lot of political risk in one place. Second, paying premium prices is fine if the parts end up worth more than their sum, but Savvy has not yet shown that owning Scopely, EFG, Moonton, and a strategic-stakes portfolio creates more than owning each separately. Finally, much of the case, particularly for Moonton, rests on competitive gaming continuing to grow into a genuinely mainstream category. That outcome remains uncertain.
Investment strategies that aren't chasing returns are anchored in softer objectives, and those can shift. Saudi capital filled a real void when Chinese buyers pulled back, and valuations in gaming were better for it. But Saudi Arabia now owns a meaningful slice of the industry, and if it ever stops being the biggest buyer, it's not obvious who replaces it. The void that follows may be more visible than the one it filled.
Savvy has built its empire faster than anyone expected. Whether it ever earns its $38 billion back is almost beside the point. For PIF, owning the industry was always the goal.
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In Other News
💸 Funding & Acquisitions:
- US-based video game retailer GameStop has submitted a non-binding proposal to acquire US-based e-commerce marketplace eBay, implying a total undiluted equity value of ~$55.5B.
- US-based real-money gaming startup EasyWin has closed its second seed funding round at a $20M valuation.
- Chance Studios has raised $3.2M to expand its app designed for trading card game collectors.
- Turkish mobile studio Mindtail raises $2M for AI-driven puzzle games.
- Supercell acquires Metacore to add Merge Mansion to its "live games portfolio".
- Rewarded play platform Mistplay has acquired rewarded ads platform MyChips from MAF for an undisclosed fee.
📊 Business & Products:
- Crimson Desert studio Pearl Abyss's share prices stabilize as sales top 3M.
- Remedy reports "stable" Q1 performance despite decreases in revenue and operating profit.
- Sony expected to pay US customers $7.8M in PlayStation Store settlement.
- CCP Games rebrands as Fenris Creations following sale from Pearl Abyss.
- EA closes FY26 with "record" performance thanks to Battlefield 6 and Apex Legends.
- Savvy Games Group and Roblox sign MoU to grow Saudi Arabia’s game development ecosystem.
👾 Miscellaneous:
- Griffin Gaming Partners launches $100M indie dev fund, led by Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender.
- EA signs multi-year licensing and partnership deal with Brazilian Football Confederation.
- IGN Entertainment releases internal data as public report, developed by Kantar and UC Berkeley.
- Epic and Disney launch largest IP toolset to date, allowing creators to build Star Wars games in Fortnite.
- Unity launches open beta for Unity AI game development tools.
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Content Worth Consuming
"It's a Totally Crazy Market" — The Seismic Impact of the AI Boom on Video Game Hardware (gamesindustry.biz): “Generative AI has had a seismic impact on the price and availability of computer hardware. Major chip producers like Samsung, Hynix, and Micron have focused on furnishing the rapidly rising number of AI data centres around the world, and as a result, components for consumer hardware are in short supply – and have skyrocketed in price. Memory chips have been particularly affected. Double data rate 5 (DDR5) – the current industry standard for random access memory (RAM) – now costs six to eight times as much as it did in September 2025.”
Navigating the AI Future (Gamecraft): “Mitch and Blake offer their thoughts about how to navigate the introduction and impact of large language model AI in the video game business. They begin by discussing their opinion that AI represents a significant technological innovation with potentially profoundly disruptive implications. Beyond even a simple technology innovation, AI is likely to be a paradigm-changing event, that calls into question many of the accepted methods and ideas underlying current game production and marketing.”
Why Some Games Never Die (Building Better Games): “In this episode, Ben sits down with Shahar Sorek, the Chief Marketing Officer at Overwolf, to talk about why the "ship and pray" model is broken and how User-Generated Content (UGC) has become the industry’s most powerful "immortality engine." Shahar brings over 15 years of experience as a studio founder, technology leader, and even a Hollywood creative producer to the table, offering a unique perspective on the convergence of media, tech, and community.”
We Talk 007, Amazon, Switch 2, Hitman and MindsEye with IO Interactive Boss Hakan Abrak (The Game Business): “In this week's edition of The Game Business Show, we are joined by Hakan Abrak, the CEO of IO Interactive and game director on 007 First Light. In our chat, we discuss Bond, the relationship with Amazon, support for Nintendo Switch 2, lessons from publishing MindsEye, the state of Project Fantasy and the future of Hitman.”
The Modern Mobile Gaming Economy (Mobile Dev Memo Podcast): “On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Phil Black, one of the co-hosts of the Game Economist Cast, a podcast dedicated to game economy design. Previously, Phil held game economist and analytics roles at Amazon Games, DICE, and Scopely. Phil joins me on this episode to examine the shifting dynamics of the mobile gaming economy, from the consolidation of high-revenue genres to the strategic adoption of AI and direct-to-consumer models.”
More About Naavik
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