It has been just over a month since Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund completed its $55 billion leveraged buyout of Electronic Arts, and the dust has barely settled before the next major structural question is already on the table. According to a Bloomberg report published September 10, 2026, PIF executives are now weighing whether to merge EA with Savvy Games Group — the Saudi fund’s existing gaming arm — to create what would be one of the largest gaming companies on the planet. No final decision has been made, but if this goes ahead, it would put EA FC, Battlefield, Apex Legends, The Sims, Pokemon Go, Monopoly Go, and a major esports organization under a single corporate structure controlled by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Let’s break down exactly what we know, what Savvy Games Group actually is, why the Savvy CEO just resigned, and what all of this might mean for the games and studios involved.
What Bloomberg’s Report Actually Says
The Bloomberg report is sourced from people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because the information is confidential. PIF executives are described as evaluating a merger to “ensure better coordination between its assets” — which is the kind of language that corporate restructurings almost always use and which covers a wide range of actual motivations from genuine operational efficiency to straightforward consolidation of control.
Key details from the report:
- No final decision has been made — this is still at the evaluation stage
- A merger is unlikely to proceed until Savvy completes its $6 billion acquisition of Moonton, a Chinese mobile gaming company currently being acquired from ByteDance
- Any merger of this scale would face regulatory scrutiny, similar to what Microsoft encountered with its Activision Blizzard acquisition
- Both EA and PIF declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg
The PIF completed its acquisition of EA on August 4, 2026, taking a 93% stake alongside co-investors Silver Lake Partners and Affinity Partners — the private equity firm run by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law. The $55 billion price tag made it one of the largest gaming transactions ever recorded and one of the largest leveraged buyouts in any industry in recent years.
What Is Savvy Games Group and What Does It Own?
If you haven’t been tracking Saudi Arabia’s gaming investments closely, Savvy Games Group is a bigger deal than it might sound. It was established in 2021 as the PIF’s dedicated vehicle for gaming investments and was given approximately $38 billion in capital to deploy. Over the past several years, it has built a substantial portfolio:
- Scopely — acquired for $4.9 billion in 2023, bringing in Monopoly Go, Stumble Guys, Star Trek Fleet Command, and more. Scopely subsequently acquired Niantic’s games business for approximately $3.5 billion in 2025, adding Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now to the portfolio
- ESL FACEIT Group — one of the world’s largest esports organizations, handling major competitive gaming events across multiple titles
- Moonton — pending acquisition for $6 billion from ByteDance, the company behind Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, one of the biggest mobile games in Southeast Asia
- Minority stakes in Capcom, Nintendo, Koei Tecmo, Activision Blizzard (now Microsoft Gaming), and Take-Two Interactive
What this means is that Savvy Games Group is already a major force in mobile gaming and esports independently of EA. A merger would combine Savvy’s mobile-first portfolio — Pokemon Go alone reportedly has around 80 million monthly active users — with EA’s console and PC franchises, its live-service games like Apex Legends, its sports licenses across EA Sports FC and Madden NFL, and its development studios. The combined entity would have meaningful presence across nearly every major segment of the gaming market simultaneously: console, PC, mobile, and esports.
The Franchise List Is Genuinely Staggering
Let’s put the combined portfolio on paper because the scale of it is easy to underestimate when you’re reading through corporate structure details. If this merger goes ahead, a single Saudi-owned entity would control:
- EA Sports FC (the world’s biggest football game franchise)
- Madden NFL, NBA Live, EA Sports NHL
- Battlefield 6 (launching later this year)
- Apex Legends
- The Sims franchise
- Need for Speed
- Mass Effect
- Dragon Age
- Pokemon Go
- Monopoly Go
- Stumble Guys
- Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now
- Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (pending Moonton close)
- ESL FACEIT Group esports operations
That’s a lineup that spans casual mobile games, competitive multiplayer, sports simulation, narrative RPGs, and esports infrastructure simultaneously. From a pure portfolio breadth perspective, the combined company would rival or exceed Microsoft Gaming in terms of franchise count and market reach.
The Savvy CEO Just Resigned — And That Timing Is Telling
One detail that makes the Bloomberg report feel more substantive rather than speculative is what happened just nine days before it was published. Brian Ward, CEO of Savvy Games Group, stepped down from his role. Ward had been the architect of Savvy’s major acquisitions and investments since its founding, overseeing the Scopely purchase, the ESL FACEIT deal, and the framework for the Moonton acquisition currently in progress.
His departure statement described it as “the right time for new leadership” as Savvy “embarks on its next period of transformational growth.” He has been replaced on an interim basis by Turqi Alnowaiser, the deputy governor of the PIF itself — a Saudi government official stepping directly into the CEO chair of a gaming company. That’s a significant shift in the level of direct PIF control over Savvy’s day-to-day operations, and it becomes considerably more meaningful in the context of a potential merger with EA that would put everything under more direct PIF oversight.
Whether Ward’s departure was related to disagreements about the merger direction or simply a planned transition, the timing leaves room for interpretation. The replacement of an industry veteran CEO with a PIF deputy governor right before a major restructuring report drops is not the kind of coincidence that analysts tend to ignore.
The Regulatory Question — Will This Clear Antitrust Review?
Any merger of this scale would require regulatory clearance in multiple jurisdictions, and the Activision Blizzard acquisition — which was a comparable scale transaction — set a precedent for how intensive that review process can be. Microsoft faced years of scrutiny from the FTC in the US and the CMA in the UK before the deal was eventually approved in October 2023.
However, as PC Gamer noted, there is a political dimension here that may smooth the regulatory path. PIF’s chairman is Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. The EA acquisition was facilitated in part through connections to Jared Kushner and by extension the Trump administration. Those political relationships may prove relevant if US antitrust regulators are considering how aggressively to scrutinize a Saudi sovereign wealth fund’s gaming portfolio consolidation. The FTC’s approach to gaming mergers has varied significantly based on political appointments and priorities.
The EU, UK, and other major gaming markets would conduct their own reviews independently, and the sheer breadth of the combined portfolio across mobile and console could attract scrutiny around market dominance in specific segments — particularly mobile gaming given the Scopely, Niantic games, and Moonton assets combined.
What It Could Mean for EA’s Studios and Franchises
The question that matters most to actual players is what this means for the games they care about. When the EA acquisition was first announced, EA told employees they would “maintain creative control” and that “creative freedom and player-first values will remain intact.” Those assurances were issued in the context of the acquisition itself — a merger with Savvy Games Group would represent another layer of structural change on top of one that hasn’t yet fully settled.
Experts speaking to outlets at the time of the original acquisition flagged concerns about the leveraged buyout structure specifically. A leveraged buyout means EA now carries substantial debt that needs to be serviced annually regardless of how the gaming market performs. That financial pressure — not just the Saudi ownership itself — is what analysts flagged as potentially forcing changes to EA’s portfolio strategy. Some projected that EA could move away from single-player games toward live-service titles that generate recurring revenue, and potentially pursue studio closures or significant staff cuts to reduce operational costs while the debt is being paid down.
Merging with Savvy and its mobile-heavy portfolio would add additional mobile revenue streams to the combined entity, which could either relieve some of that financial pressure or shift EA’s development priorities further toward the mobile and live-service approaches that generate more predictable recurring income. Which direction it pushes depends heavily on how the merged company’s leadership prioritizes its studio investments.
On the content side, there have also been broader concerns about whether Saudi ownership through PIF could result in games being censored or content altered to reflect government sensitivities — a concern that applies to the EA acquisition independently and would only become more pointed under a more directly integrated structure with Savvy.
The Bigger Picture of Saudi Arabia’s Gaming Ambitions
Saudi Arabia’s investment in gaming isn’t accidental or purely financial. The Kingdom has been explicit about its Vision 2030 strategy, which includes building a domestic entertainment industry and positioning Saudi Arabia as a global hub for gaming and esports. Hosting major esports events, building game development infrastructure domestically, and acquiring controlling stakes in global gaming companies are all components of that strategy.
The PIF’s gaming portfolio — if the EA and Savvy merger goes through and the Moonton acquisition closes — would represent one of the most comprehensive gaming asset portfolios ever assembled. The strategic logic from PIF’s perspective is straightforward: owning both the games people play (EA’s console and PC franchises), the mobile games with the highest active user counts (Pokemon Go, Monopoly Go, potentially Mobile Legends), and the esports infrastructure that hosts competitive play around many of those games creates a vertically integrated gaming empire with touchpoints across almost every segment of how people engage with games.
Whether this ultimately benefits players, workers at the studios involved, or the broader gaming ecosystem is considerably less certain than whether it benefits the PIF’s strategic objectives. The history of large gaming consolidations — from EA’s own acquisition of studios like Bullfrog, Maxis, Westwood, and Black Box in earlier eras, to more recent examples — suggests that scale and portfolio breadth don’t automatically translate into better games or better treatment of development staff.
For now, this remains a report from Bloomberg’s sources rather than an announced deal. No timeline has been confirmed, the Moonton acquisition needs to close first, and regulatory hurdles are real. But the direction of travel is clear enough: Saudi Arabia’s PIF is building toward something larger than any individual acquisition, and EA is now central to that plan rather than a standalone investment. If you’re tracking the broader gaming industry restructuring happening right now, our coverage of the Rockstar GTA 6 legal situation and the Wardogs launch chaos paint a picture of an industry in genuinely unusual motion right now across every level from indie development to sovereign wealth fund consolidation.
