How speed and brand partners are helping Riyadh grow games and esports | Brian Ward interview

Saudi Arabia is trying to accelerate its growth in the games and esports industries using a very inorganic means: speed.

The company is pouring its oil wealth into gaming, with $37 billion from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund earmarked for games. Savvy Games Group, a Riyadh-based company run by CEO Brian Ward, put that money to work last year with its $4.9 billion purchase of Scopely.

After that, Scopely’s mobile game Monopoly Go took off and generated more than $2 billion in revenues in its first 10 months. That made Saudi Arabia’s plan of going fast look brilliant. But this success only helps Saudi Arabia and Savvy advance its goals of creating a financial empire in games. What needs to happen next is the creation of more jobs in Saudi Arabia itself to offset the inevitable decline of the oil economy.

Can the country, whose conservative values have historically made it a difficult destination for migrants, grow its own game talent? On the one hand, it’s hard to change cultural norms that don’t sync well with Western values. And on the other hand, Saudi Arabia has a young population and most of those growing up now have been gamers for life. That’s a necessary requirement of creating a game industry, as mainly authentic gamers are the ones who can create the biggest gaming hits.

In another deal, Savvy announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with
Niantic, the maker of location-based games like Pokemon Go, to support Niantic’s expansion into the MENA-3 region, specifically in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. Savvy also signed an MoU with Xsolla to create more economic opportunities in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Savvy has roughly 3,500 employees now and about 40% of the global esports industry.

I met Ward at the Gamescom expo event in Cologne, Germany and we discussed the topic of velocity. I also heard Ward speak at the New Global Sport Conference in Riyadh.

Esports growth

In addition to the topic of speed, we also discussed esports growth, where the company has also invested heavily with its acquisition of ESL FaceIt Group and the launch of the Esports World Cup in Boulevard City near Riyadh.

Savvy revealed today that the Esports World Cup recorded more than 500 million viewers who consumed over 250 million hours of content, making it the most-watched tournament of 2024, with a peak viewership of 3.5 million during the League of Legends Grand Final.

The Esports World Cup went on for eight weeks. Team Falcons were crowned the first Club Champion at the Closing Ceremony – marking the biggest weekend in esports history. The Club finished with 5,665 points, including two game championships (Call of Duty: Warzone, Free Fire) and six additional Top 3 finishes. After Team Falcons, Team Liquid (2,545 points, $4 million), Team BDS (2,000 points, $2 million), Team Vitality (1,650 points, $1.5 million) and T1 (1,600 points, $1.25 million) rounded out the Top 5.

Team Falcons were awarded $7 million in life-changing prize money from a prize pool of more than $60 million, alongside the Esports World Cup Championship Trophy, presented to CEO Mossad “Msdossary” Al-Dossary by HRH Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia.

The Esports World Cup welcomed more than 1,500 of the world’s best esports players from over 100 countries as they competed across 22 competitions in 21 games. The games lineup consisted of (in alphabetic order): Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Call of Duty: Warzone, Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, EA Sports FC 24, Fortnite, Free Fire, Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Overwatch 2, PUBG Battlegrounds, PUBG Mobile, ESL R1, Rocket League, StarCraft II, Street Fighter 6, Teamfight Tactics, TEKKEN 8 and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Siege. 

There were 60,000 tickets to esports competitions sold, with only 3,000 tickets left. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang registered the event’s highest peak viewership with nearly 2.4 million concurrents, the largest figure for any MLBB tournament in 2024. I saw the closing ceremony, which featured artist Steve Aoki, for the Esports World Cup on Sunday night. It was quite a spectacle, as was the nearby The Boulevard venue where the tournaments took place.

The MLBB Women’s Invitational saw 2.5 million hours watched and 265,117 peak viewers, becoming the fourth most-watched event in women’s esports history. Dota 2 saw 55 million hours watched, making it the most-watched tournament for the game in 2024. And there were 53 million hours watched and 3.4 million peak viewers for the League of Legends competition, making it the largest third-party tournament for the game in the last decade. And overall there were a billion impressions across socials, with 270 million social video views, and 58 million engagements.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: The velocity of the business seems like one of the differentiators, how fast you move. How much of a value is that? How do you make that happen? How do you still manage to be thoughtful and careful while you’re going fast?

Brian Ward: It helps to be born with a Type A personality. But it’s what I love about this industry. It moves fast. I practiced law for a number of years. In law, something changes every 300 years. In video games it changes every six months.

From my experience, where I really got the pace and understood the importance of moving fast was when I started at Electronic Arts, working with Don Mattrick and Paul Lee and those guys. Don made 10 times more decisions in a span of time than any other human I’d ever met at that point. The value of that was pretty obvious. Certainly when it comes to building companies–most of the companies in our industry were built organically, or mostly organically. In doing deals and transactions and so forth, time is not your friend. You’d better move fast, or the next guy will be right behind you.

GamesBeat: There’s a similar theme in the long-term goals of Savvy Games Group and Saudi Arabia. Trying to accelerate the growth of talent in the region. Getting people to Riyadh. There’s a lot of emphasis on speed there too.

Ward: What people generally don’t appreciate, or appreciate fully, is the pace of change in Saudi Arabia under Vision 2030 and the whole transformation of the country, the diversification of the economy. We’ve had this conversation before. It’s like China 40 years ago. That’s a big surprise to people. It was to me, for sure. Talent development and skill development for building a games and esports hub is not something that will be achieved overnight, but the faster we can move on that front, the better off we’ll be. We already have a lot of inbound interest from companies in our industry who are interested in serving the market from inside the market in Saudi Arabia. But we need to develop the skills and talent of the people who are there in order to fill those jobs. They have to move fast.

GamesBeat: I was at Devcom here this week. The Indian presenters went up and talked about how fast they’re growing. One of them said that the average age of the gamer there is 28. The average age of the gamers in the U.S. is more like 40. They’re finally getting a generation of people who grew up playing games. That seems like the base requirement for talent. They have to have grown up playing games in order to know what’s good. In that sense, they seem to be ready for this in the Middle East as well.

Ward: A whole generation of people have grown up playing games. In Saudi, 67% of the population consider themselves gamers. That’s one of the highest percentages in the world. Not only are they gamers, but they’re very knowledgeable about the sector, very enthusiastic about learning more and gaining experience in the sector.

I don’t have any doubt that Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, will become a global games and esports hub. It’s already becoming an esports hub after just five years’ time. But in games as well. I’m more concerned about the time frame in which people expect that to happen. The objectives, like 39,000 sector jobs–that’s possible. It’s doable. Saudi has about the same population as Canada, and Canada has almost that many video game jobs. But that’s not going to occur in four years.

GamesBeat: The longer term necessity for speed seems to come from–oil could run out in 27 years. You have to have jobs ready. That’s where the urgency comes from.

Ward: I’m not the guy to ask about the petrochemical industry. You can talk to the minister of energy about that. But I love this mentality. Vision 2030 puts a bright light on the finish line. I don’t think that’s the finish line. I think it’s just an intermediary stop on a much longer journey. But it’s motivating and exciting to work toward a set of goals, defined goals, on a defined timeline. It’s very motivating, rather than a general, “We’re going to try to do this over some undefined period of time.”

GamesBeat: [Tell me about] The Esports World Cup. What have you noticed about how far along you’ve come?

Ward: If you asked me a year ago if we could pull off the Esports World Cup in 2024, I would have said, “No, that’s not possible.” The fact that it’s gone amazingly well is just fantastic news. Record-breaking attendance and viewership and exposure. We’re not done. We have a few more days left, and then a big summit with more than 1,200 delegates. It’s going to be an exciting week. It’s super exciting that the Falcons won over Team Liquid. For the local fans, that’s just amazing.

GamesBeat: The Olympics [announcement]. I didn’t quite grasp how much it’s going to change things, even for next year.

Ward: What’s been announced is the inaugural Esports Olympics, to be held in Riyadh in 2025. Then a regular cadence of Olympic esports thereafter. We of course hope to run that tournament, just as we’ve run the World Cup and Gamers8 before that. We’re excited about being a long term partner in the Olympic ecosystem.

GamesBeat: For both the Esports World Cup and the Olympic side, it sounds like Saudi Arabia is making progress in building a belief in the culture of gaming around the world.

Ward: Speaking about esports specifically, I think Saudi Arabia has made great progress in being a meaningful contributor to the growth and consolidation and stability of that piece of our business. That was the theory also when we acquired ESL and Faceit. It was a pretty fragmented space. It was characterized by challenging economics. If we took a long term view to providing capital and investing in the space, we could not only consolidate some of the space and end up with stronger participants, but we could also make the economics better for everyone.

A rising tide lifts all boats. We’ve seen that already now, where publisher agreements have become longer. Publishers have more faith that the sector is stable. The economics and other issues will be better. On the other side, sponsorship and advertising are also better. They’re offering better economics. Those agreements are longer and monetize better.

GamesBeat: I saw an interesting deal that Kwalee had done in Riyadh with a Saudi startup to start making its first game. They’re coming in from the U.K. as external development. They get incentivized to do that, getting access to funding and all that. It’s an external development and central studio sort of relationship, but the external developers are the ones teaching the central studio how to make games. I thought that was a fairly clever way of accelerating the situation. They want to get that homegrown startup off the ground fast, get them hiring people.

Ward: Everybody does want to go faster. The Saudi people are very keen on Vision 2030 and what it’s bringing, the opportunities it provides. Women in particular are on fire in terms of excitement about new opportunities and new sectors for employment and participation in that kind of thing. In our sector, people are now excited because there’s a lot of investment coming in, a lot of inbound interest in the sector. There are a lot of innovative ways to figure out how to accelerate the training and development and skills of the people in the sector in Saudi. We need to be further along in working with the stakeholders in the Kingdom to provide the right sort of companies to come there, bring leadership, and be looking for people.

GamesBeat: Scopely got a lot of attention in the last year. What should people know about the rest of the Savvy portfolio and other parts of the world that you’re interested in?

Ward: The mandate is to build a global leading games and esports company. We can’t ignore Asia and we can’t ignore mobile, or any other significant portion of the sector. We’re actively looking for teams, studios, companies where they’re looking for additional funding, or they have early investors who want some liquidity, or they’re looking for a new long-term capital partner for some reason. If that’s in the east, great. If it’s in the west, great. We’re aiming to cover the whole world. Very few have done that, outside of Tencent, and become deeply successful in all regions. If we’re smart and the opportunities continue to present themselves, we’ll be able to have a balanced portfolio across the globe.

GamesBeat: We have culture wars and real wars all over the world now, and it seems like a company needs to be able to navigate all of them.

Ward: I don’t know that we’ve encountered any significant cultural issues. Obviously all the markets of the world have unique characteristics. Even Europe isn’t one market. It’s many markets. Africa is many markets. Latin America is several markets, and so on. That’s why we’re looking to grow organically. It gives you the opportunity to partner with people who are looking for long-term capital, but already know how to serve their market, how to build a company in their particular region. They’ve solved a lot of the cultural issues and can help educate us as a long-term capital provider around some of those points.