Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has agreed to acquire Electronic Arts, in a deal the kingdom's leadership frames as a milestone in its campaign to build gaming influence — and which makes a foreign state the outright owner of one of the largest publishers in Western games.

The transaction places EA — the publisher behind FIFA/EA Sports FC, Battlefield, The Sims, and Madden — under the control of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and its gaming arm, Savvy Games Group. The Ringer, which reported on the acquisition's strategic dimensions, frames the deal as Riyadh wielding "soft power with a game controller": the purchase extends a state project that has already reshaped sports, entertainment, and now interactive media.

For EA's business operations, the immediate question is continuity. The publisher's slate of annualized sports franchises — headlined by EA Sports FC, the rebranded successor to FIFA that carries ultimate-team-style monetization built on card packs and live-service economies — generates recurring revenue that now accrues, ultimately, to a state fund. Live-service mechanics across EA's portfolio, including Apex Legends and The Sims 4's add-on ecosystem, sit inside the deal's perimeter.

The acquisition is the largest move yet in a Saudi gaming strategy that has unfolded in stages. The Public Investment Fund previously built minority stakes in EA, Take-Two, and Activision Blizzard before Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of the Call of Duty publisher closed in 2023. Savvy Games, chaired until recently by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, committed $37.8 billion to gaming in 2022 under the kingdom's Vision 2030 diversification program, with roughly $13 billion earmarked for a major publisher acquisition. The EA deal represents that plan reaching its destination.

The purchase also compounds an existing web of Saudi money in the industry. ESL FACEIT Group, the esports operator, is already Savvy-owned following a combined acquisition reportedly worth around $1.5 billion in 2022. Scopely, the mobile publisher behind Monopoly Go!, joined the portfolio in a $4.9 billion acquisition in 2023. Niantic's games business sold to Scopely for $3.5 billion in 2025. EA now sits atop this stack as the flagship asset.

What changes for studios and teams? In the near term, Saudi ownership has so far meant operational autonomy at portfolio companies rather than interference in development pipelines. The longer-term risks are different in kind: political scrutiny of Saudi ownership in Western markets, questions about creative content touching the kingdom's sensitivities, and the precedent of a government — rather than a publicly traded company — directing capital allocation across franchises that employ tens of thousands of developers and contractors worldwide.

The soft-power dimension is the analytical core of The Ringer's assessment. Saudi Arabia has used sport — golf via LIV, football via the Newcastle United purchase and player recruitment into the Saudi Pro League, boxing, Formula 1 — to buy visibility and diplomatic goodwill. Games extend that playbook to an audience of billions of players, with EA's franchises among the most widely played entertainment products on earth. Ownership of that catalog gives the kingdom leverage over cultural output in a medium that rivals film and television in reach.

It also concentrates power in a consolidating industry. With Microsoft holding Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, Sony expanding through Bungie and its own acquisitions, and now a sovereign fund holding EA outright, the number of independent publishers at the top tier keeps shrinking. Mid-sized publishers and independent studios face a market where their most likely acquirers are either platform holders or state funds — a shift that changes negotiating dynamics, valuations, and the strategic logic of staying independent.

Regulatory review is the next signal to watch. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and other national-security screens have grown more willing to examine media and technology transactions involving sovereign buyers, and the size of this deal makes it a test case for how far Western regulators will let state funds go in owning entertainment infrastructure. CFIUS and EU approval processes — and any conditions attached to them — will define what Saudi control of EA actually looks like in practice.