Saudi Game Vision 2030
Recent reports suggest Saudi Arabia is feeling a capital pinch after buying Scopely and EA (~$61B). Now, with the closing of Sandsoft it's become apparent the country is world-class at buying capability, not building it. No state has spent more on assembling a global portfolio while producing so little local talent. And despite all this interest in games (ha, eSports), it's baffling that Saudi's Vision 2030, a plan to reduce oil dependence, doesn't have a games plank. Welcome to GAME VISION 2030.
Michail Katkoff told a story on TWIG that captures the underlying confusion. After a day of investor meetings in Saudi Arabia, the group was invited to a private residence. Inside, the hosts had arranged rows of high-end PCs, coaches waiting at the stations, and a full professional League of Legends setup ready for play. This wasn't some industrial strategy; instead, it was a glimpse into the preferences of the elite. The royal family likes games, and personal taste rather than state capability has driven billions in acquisitions.
The reality is that you cannot buy an industry, but you can develop an ecosystem. Like all economic clusters, the Games industry depends on agglomeration effects, knowledge spillovers, and dense local networks of artists, engineers, designers, and producers. Vision 2030 has... no vision here. Without a talent base, capital doesn’t multiply; it evaporates into one-off deals.
GAME VISION 2030 corrects this with three planks.
First, build a top-tier game university. Not a regional school, but a global institution the likes of which the world has never seen. Recruit leading designers, engineers, and researchers. Make it the world’s most concentrated hub of game craft. This is how you create durable spillovers.
Second, require every Savvy-adjacent investment to establish a local support studio. If you put a billion dollars into Niantic, Scopely, or EA, the country should receive something more tangible than a stake. Each partner should operate a team in Saudi Arabia, contributing to real production: Monopoly Go live-ops, FIFA content, Pokémon GO event pipelines. This is how capability forms.
Third, seed a domestic fund for Saudi-based founders. Provide grants, early capital, publishing support, and a path from prototype to live service. No country builds a creative industry without local entrepreneurs at the center. I'm sure Ilkka Paananen would spin up another Supercell Spark program after Tokyo.
While the personal preference for games among Saudi capital allocators is flattering, actually contributing to the games ecosystem is far more ambitious. There are millions of citizens with whom we can share the joy of this sausage-making process, and GAME VISION 2030 is how Saudi Arabia gets there.