From fatwas to ‘Fortnite’: Saudi Arabia’s $38-billion play to rule esports

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — With the Esports World Cup quickly approaching, the office of the foundation organizing the tournament was buzzing with employees running qualifying matches and finalizing the opening ceremony of the competition with a $70-million prize pool.

The seven-week event starting July 8 is at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s bid to dominate the world of competitive gaming and the video game industry at large. Mike McCabe, the veteran gaming industry executive who heads the EWC Foundation, explained how gamesmanship would influence every aspect of the event.

“Every team gets one of these,” said McCabe as he picked up a metal figure made of two concentric triangles from his desk.

He separated the center triangle from the outer one. If a team won a championship, he said, the centerpiece would go into the trophy, while the other would be embedded on a totem displayed in the Saudi capital.

“If they lose, it gets crushed by this massive new pneumatic press, then ground up and put into the bottom of the totem for next year,” McCabe said, a smile on his face.

“So there’s this huge gamification, even with the trophy.”

“Huge gamification” may be the central ethos of the kingdom’s National Gaming and Esports Strategy, a $38-billion play that aims to position Saudi Arabia as a “global hub in the games and esports sector by 2030” and to replicate the country’s petrodollar-backed entry into the wider world of sports and entertainment.

It’s another element in Saudi Arabia’s about-face from a hermit kingdom notorious for puritanical laws to a tourist destination that can draw 150 million visitors a year.

Ahmad Muhaimin Bin Abd Razak (MINBAPPE) of Team Malaysia celebrates against Team India during the FIFAe World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2024.

(Joosep Martinson / FIFA via Getty Images)

The effort goes well beyond hosting this summer’s tournament — the premier esports competition on the planet — or hosting the inaugural Olympic Esports Games in 2027 for a 12-year term.

Saudi Arabia is embedding gaming within marquee construction projects of Vision 2030, the all-out, post-oil transformation plan spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, reportedly an enthusiastic gamer himself. (“League of Legends” is his favorite, we’re told.)

Neom, the futuristic megacity on the Red Sea coast, intends to be the region’s “first true gaming hub,” according to its website, featuring a campus, recording studios, and motion capture and visual effects for game development. Another giga-project near Riyadh, Qiddiya City, is supposed to have a dedicated esports district the size of 17 city blocks, with four arenas and space for esports clubs and gaming companies’ regional headquarters.

The kingdom has also looked outward. Over the last few years, Savvy Games Group, a company owned by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s $700-billion flagship sovereign fund, has acquired roughly 40% of the global esports industry, including the Electronic Sports League — the gaming equivalent of the NFL — according to Savvy corporate materials.

Savvy acquired Scopely, the studio based in Culver City, and behind “Monopoly Go!”; the acquisition catapulted Savvy to become the top mobile game publisher in the U.S. and the fourth globally, excluding China. In May, Savvy closed its acquisition of Niantic, the creator of “Pokemon Go!’ for $3.5 billion. The fund also owns parts of Nintendo (4.19%), Activision (4.9%), Take-Two Interactive (6.52%), Electronic Arts (9.34%) and a raft of smaller studios.

The staggering scale of the investment has made Saudi Arabia the impossible-to-ignore behemoth in the room, especially amid a post-pandemic contraction hitting the industry in the U.S. and Europe that has seen major gaming companies fire some 34,000 people in the last three years, according to industry layoff trackers.

That’s despite accusations of “games washing,” the notion that the kingdom is promoting esports — just as it bankrolled golf, tennis, boxing, wrestling and Formula One racing — to distract from its record of domestic repression, especially the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and insider-turned-critic of the crown prince.

Team Portugal celebrate against Team Spain during the FIFAe World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2024.

(Gonzalo Arroyo / FIFA via Getty Images)

Yet many emphasize the main focus of the kingdom’s esports strategy is local, with a plan to set up 250 gaming companies in Saudi Arabia that will create 39,000 jobs, and contribute some $13.3 billion to GDP by 2030.

“It’s not just about, ‘We’re going to own a bunch of video-game-related companies across the world. It’s ‘How does this improve or grow over generations the industry in these Middle Eastern countries?’ ” said Derek Douglas, head of the Video Games Group at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). “It’s really predicated on this idea of diversification and growth within the region.”

That’s no easy task in a country where authorities once issued a religious fatwa against Pokemon playing cards. (The reason given was that they promoted evolution and gambling.) But McCabe and other leaders in the nascent gaming industry here insist there’s potential, with roughly two-thirds of Saudi Arabia’s 23 million people identifying as “gaming enthusiasts,” according to a 2021 report from Boston Consulting Group,

“Gaming is huge everywhere, but it’s huge on a different level here,” McCabe said, and not only because more than two-thirds of Saudi society is under 35. “There’s a climatic element as well: It’s really hot in the summer and people spend a lot of time playing video games.”

Some local success stories have already emerged in esports, such as Mohammed Al-Dossary, who won the 2018 FIFA eWorld Cup and now runs Team Falcons, an esports team reportedly backed by the royal family and which regularly signs players from around the world. In May the Falcons signed a partnership with Red Bull to be its official performance partner during this year’s Esports World Cup.

Not all are sanguine regarding the Saudis’ gilt-edged charm offensive. The developers of GeoGuessr, a game that — you guessed it — has people suss out locations based on Google Street View imagery, recently withdrew from the Esports World Cup after angry fans threatened to boycott the game because of the kingdom’s human rights record.

“You — our community — have made it clear that this decision does not align with what GeoGuessr stands for,” said a statement from the developers.

To kickstart a game development industry essentially from scratch, the government set up a panoply of incubators and accelerators, partnering with international educational organizations such as Digipen, a gaming-focused college, to draw Saudi entrepreneurs and aspiring developers. But the programs have struggled to get enough qualified participants, observers say, and have tended to focus their efforts on Riyadh rather than across the country.

Others say that’s changing and point to similar endeavors in China and elsewhere that took decades before they bore results.

“The West started utilizing China as an outsourcer for some engineering but primarily as for these massive art houses that were relatively cheap compared to U.S. and Western studios,” Douglas from CAA said.

“Smash-cut to today, you now have a generation and a half of individuals that have been trained to make video games. And so we’re seeing a lot of next-generation content coming from there.”

Last year, China released “Black Myth: Wukong,” its first AAA title — that is, a game with budgets in the hundreds of millions, featuring advanced graphics and gameplay; Douglas says several others are already in the pipeline.

Yannick Theler, chief executive of Steer Studios, a Riyadh-based games studio that is part of Savvy, is confident the kingdom’s first locally made AAA title is just a matter of time, though perhaps beyond 2030.

“That’s why I came here: because of the holistic view [authorities] are taking in developing talent and the ecosystem,” said Theler, who previously founded Ubisoft Abu Dhabi. Already, Steer Studios was working with schools to teach children coding and game design at an early age.

“We’ll need 10 years once we put everything — studios, academies, accelerators — in place,” he said, adding Steer currently has 100 employees, half of them Saudi.

One person with a headstart is 24-year-old Abdulrahman Rashd, a developer who started designing maps when he was 12 for “Minecraft,” the smash-hit creative building game, and later sold them on the game’s marketplace.

“It was honestly fun. It provided a sense of purpose, because making things felt really good. And when we started making money, it changed our lives,” he said, adding that over the years he and a co-founder have netted around $1 million from the marketplace — a figure that stunned his parents.

“At first, they were classic Arab parents, saying things like ‘Why are you wasting your time on games,’ ” Rashd said, laughing.

“But then they saw the money and said I should keep going.”

Team Japan huddles during the second day of the FIFAe World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2024.

(Gonzalo Arroyo / FIFA via Getty Images)

Rashd, who studied computer science at university, got a spot in a government-backed incubator and accelerator program called Saudi Game Champions. To qualify, he and a friend participated in a so-called Game Jam, where they had to design a game in three days around a theme; in this case, what they considered delightful.

“We did a top-down farming simulator. Why? Because it’s really relaxing and honestly quite delightful in games,” Rashd said.

He’s using his time at Saudi Game Champions to develop a title called “Up With Doznik,“ a first-person action-adventure game. “Fight shapeshifting monsters, upgrade, die, repeat — and grow stronger each time,” is the tagline.

Rashd insists there’s “insanely good talent” in the country, and that the government’s emphasis on building local talent is important.

“Investing in our people is way better than bringing in someone from abroad to do the work,” he said.

The quickest pathway to getting more designers like him, he said, was simple:

“闯耻蝉迟 do s—. Just go out there and make stuff.”