by FAN Yicheng

Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group, owned by the kingdom's Public Investment Fund (PIF), is intensifying its search for major deals in China as it seeks to become the world’s largest gaming and esports company.

During the 2025 League of Legends World Championship in Chengdu, Prince Faisal bin Bandar, Savvy's vice chairman, and CEO Brian Ward attended the finals between T1 and KT. The visit followed meetings in Shanghai and Beijing with executives from Hero Esports, Savvy's Chinese portfolio company and a leading tournament operator.

"We had a very productive session on their business performance to date," Ward told Jiemian News, adding that the visit aims to reinforce partnerships and identify new opportunities in China.

Founded in 2021 and wholly owned by PIF, Savvy is executing the gaming component of Saudi Vision 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's national plan to diversify the economy beyond oil. In 2022 the government unveiled a US$38 billion program for game development, esports, infrastructure and talent training, with Savvy as its main operator.

The group has since bought or invested in major global assets: ESL and FACEIT in Europe for US$1.5 billion, later merged as ESL FACEIT Group (EFG); Scopely for US$4.9 billion in 2023 and Niantic's gaming unit—including Pokémon GO and Pikmin Bloom—for US$3.5 billion in 2025 in the United States. These deals made Savvy the world's second-largest mobile game publisher, after China's Tencent.

Ward said the global gaming industry's revenue is now roughly balanced between East and West but Savvy's Asian footprint remains limited. "China has lots of talent capable of making great games," he said. "It's where we can explore." The company is scouting leading studios in console and PC titles as well as core mobile games that are "geographically diverse in terms of the core audience". He said in a September interview that the company is seeking its next major deal—worth tens of billions of yuan—in China or elsewhere in the region but gave no further details.

China has become a global game-development hub. Mobile hits like Honor of Kings and rising console titles such as Black Myth: Wukong have demonstrated China's growing creative strength. Ward added that Chinese developers have shown a unique ability to bring ancient history and mythology to life through games — a genre less common in the West but one that resonates in the Middle East.

Savvy entered China in 2023 with a 1.8 billion-yuan (US$250 million) investment for a 30% stake in Hero Esports, becoming its largest institutional shareholder. Headquartered in Shanghai, Hero runs major tournaments including the King Pro League for Honor of Kings, the Olympic Esports Week, and the esports events at the Hangzhou Asian Games.

This May, Hero hosted the Asia Champions League (ACL) in Shanghai, drawing more than 1,200 teams and 10,000 players—the largest esports event in Asia. Under its partnership with Savvy, 16 winning teams qualified directly for next year's Esports World Cup (EWC) in Riyadh. Ward described Hero as "a strong-performing investment," adding that China's esports market is more mature and offers lessons Savvy can replicate or adapt in Western markets.

Prince Faisal said Savvy sees China as a long-term strategic market and plans to expand beyond tournaments into tourism and game co-development. He said he hopes more Chinese teams and fans will travel to Riyadh for the next EWC — "as part of a tourism experience, not just a participation in the event."

Saudi Arabia has made gaming a key pillar of its economic diversification push under Vision 2030, aiming to foster 250 local gaming companies, create about 40,000 jobs and rank among the world's top three markets by the end of the decade. Savvy's partnership with Hero shows how Saudi capital and Chinese creativity could complement each other as the kingdom builds out its global gaming ambitions.

For Savvy, closer ties with China could make Asia its next growth engine and further establish Saudi Arabia as a rising hub in the global games industry.