Saudi Arabia’s conquest of the games industry continues apace, but whoops, the country’s Public Investment Fund appear to be running out of money. In the sense of being reportedly down to a mere pocketful of billions, anyway.
According to the New York Times (paywall), via GamesIndustry.biz, a number of the PIF’s investment projects are in “financial distress”, and the organisation’s representatives have allegedly told international investors that they’re “unable to allocate” further funds for the near future. The NYT report that the PIF’s total investments are worth around $1 trillion, of which a fair chunk have no public valuation and as such, would be difficult to sell off.
The PIF disagree with this assessment, naturally. PIF spokesperson Marwan Bakrali has told the newspaper that they still have $60 billion in cash and “similar financial instruments”. I’m interested to see the exact ratio of hard cash to “similar financial instrument” here. My personal wealth at the minute is about 30% scrumped foraged apples, but I’m pretty sure the apples are of no interest to the student loan debt collectors. This is probably not a useful comparison, unless the PIF also have major investments in the oranges trade.
This is the same Public Investment Fund that recently linked arms with Jared Kushner and Silver Lake in order to launch a $50 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts, yes. According to the NYT, none of the PIF’s videogame industry investments are in trouble, but the aforesaid Saudi-led consortium did buy EA using $20 billion of borrowed money, purportedly to be recuperated by coaxing a windfall (not of oranges) from the groaning magic money tree that is generative AI. That deal is slated to close in the first quarter of the 2027 financial year.
The PIF’s videogame investments go far beyond EA. They have stakes in Nintendo, Capcom, Nexon, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft publishers Activision-Blizzard, and GTA 6 publishers Take-Two Interactive. They’ve also sunk a lot of money into esports, alongside regular sports. All of this apparently forms part of an attempt to diversify the Kingdom’s hitherto oil-dependent economy.
I dislike and fear the PIF’s control of studios like BioWare mostly because it’s operated by a regime that has journalists, gay people and migrant workers abused, dispossessed or murdered. But it also doesn’t seem great that an increasing share of videogame developers are being consolidated under the banner of a group that appears to be having financial difficulties. One of the “distressed” projects mentioned in the NYT article is Neom (pictured above), a planned city that has necessitated the eviction of thousands of local tribespeople, some of them on pain of execution, and is estimated to have cost $8.8 trillion so far.