EA’s new Saudi Arabia owners are reportedly looking to shuffle the publisher into a new gaming giant that would combine and spearhead the country’s gaming strategy.
Bloomberg reports that early considerations at Saudi Arabia, the supermajority owner in a new consortium of investors that took EA private in a deal that closed August 4, would see EA merged with Savvy Games, a group established by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) in 2021 as the bedrock for yet more billions in investment.
EA and PIF representatives evidently declined to comment on the report.
The report stresses that final decisions have not been made and are unlikely to come until, at the very least, Savvy can close the $6 billion acquisition of Chinese studio and Mobile Legends maker Moonton.
On the Public Investment Fund website, Savvy Games’ stated goal is “achieving leadership status in the games industry by 2030.”
“Savvy has been growing rapidly since being established, with ESL FACEIT Group, the world’s #1 esports company, and Scopely, the #1 mobile games company in the United States, under its portfolio,” it adds.
If such a merger goes through, and passes regulatory scrutiny, it would put EA’s sports franchises and Scopely’s Pokemon Go – not to mention Monopoly Go! – in the same place.
Buying one of the largest game publishers in the US for $55 billion and then almost immediately pushing it into a merger with your other company – which you pumped $38 billion into in order to acquire some of the biggest players in mobile gaming – would, perhaps, raise an eyebrow in an antitrust case.
The considered merger appears mobile-heavy, but the PIF didn’t snatch up EA just for phone games, and this move could land it one of the world’s biggest gaming companies altogether.
It could also spell the end of EA as we’ve known it for years, if you generously assume that this takeover hasn’t already settled that. The EA deal stoked fears of mass layoffs at the company, even as EA leadership insists “our creative freedom and player-first values will remain intact,” and being wholly merged with Saudi Arabia’s very own mobile foothold surely wouldn’t settle those fears.