How Saudi Arabia and Savvy’s long-term push into gaming is proceeding | Jesse Meschuk interview

Savvy Games Group has made a lot of news as it has built the newest financial empire in games with acquisitions of companies like ESL, FaceIt, VSPO, Vindex and Scopely (for $4.9 billion). The latter has gone on to acquire Pokemon Go maker Niantic for $3.5 billion. Billions of dollars have changed hands already, yet Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which is backing Savvy, has pledged to invest $37 billion in games. We’ve been privileged to have a front-seat view of this transformation.

Brian Ward has carried the flag for Savvy as CEO since the company’s creation as Saudi Arabia’s big holding company for games in 2021. But Jesse Meschuk, a 20-year game veteran, has been consulting for the last two years after spending 17 years at Activision Blizzard. In January, he was named COO of the company and he joined us on stage at GamesBeat Summit 2025 for a fireside chat.

We talked about the economic landscape of games and esports, and how esports went through its winter and games are in a post-boom reality. In that context, I asked Meschuk about Savvy’s long-term investment strategy.

We also looked at the bigger picture beyond Savvy, as Saudi Arabia is planning to diversify its economy away from oil, as many predict that oil could run out in a matter of a few decades. That means that Saudi Arabia needs to create jobs in categories like clean energy but also digital industries like games. And that’s why the PIF has set aside $37 billion for games. I asked Meschuk how that big plan translates down to the company level for Savvy.

I also asked Meschuk how Scopely, which has generated $5 billion in revenue from the success of Monopoly Go, will have its own investment strategy and how that is different from Savvy’s.

When it comes to the long term, I asked Meschuk where the growth will be, and what trends he is watching. I also bounced the Epic vs. Apple outcome off of Meschuk, and how the company balances the need for grand strategy and founder autonomy in the wake of an acquisition. We talked about the significance of Black Myth: Wukong in China for local game communities, and, lastly, I closed with why Saudi Arabia. Check out the answers that Meschuk gave in this wide-ranging talk.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: We had a bit of flash news this afternoon. About 3:19 p.m. Pacific today, Epic Games sent me an email and said that Fortnite is back in the Apple App Store, after 4.5 years of lawsuits. Some people said if that happens, it’s going to be a brand new world in mobile games. What is your initial reaction to that?

Jesse Meschuk: It’s an ongoing saga. We’ll stay tuned.

GamesBeat: I guess we’ll believe it when Apple says it. Can you talk more about yourself?

Meschuk: Thanks everybody for coming. Thanks again Dean for hosting me. I’ve been in the game industry about 20 years and spent 17 of that at Activision Blizzard. I’ve been consulting with Savvy for the past two years as an adviser Brian Ward, the CEO. I joined full-time as COO in January.

GamesBeat: How would you say the economic landscape of games and esports is for Savvy now that it’s evolving? What factors are driving that growth?

Meschuk: I’d start by talking a bit around the macro environment for games in general. Acknowledging that the games industry, for a period of time, was on a real growth tear. From 2011 to 2021 the business grew like 10% a year, which is incredible. It went from $75 billion to more than $180 billion. If you think about advertising and streaming and everything else I think it was more than $230 billion. That was a period of unprecedented growth.

For the last few years we’ve seen that level off. That’s driven by–some of those growth winds have slowed. What drove that growth in the first place was mobile gaming taking off, billions of people playing on their phones. Geographic diversification, particularly in China. The rise of live services and some real innovative game modes. A lot of those things have started to mature.

From Savvy’s point of view, we see a lot of reasons to be optimistic and feel like there is still a lot of growth potential in the market. Our focus on a product-specific basis. When you talk about game development and publishing, it’s all about finding large, highly engaged communities. The reason we’re most interested in that is because those are the types of communities that tend to exhibit the longest growth curves. They tend to be the most durable and persistent over time. That will continue to be a focus.

We’ve seen some significant success through our partnership with Scopely. That team is incredible. They’ve done an amazing job. They had an ambitious plan and Savvy saw the opportunity to help them accelerate their growth potential. We’ve seen evidence of that with the amazing success of Monopoly Go.

When it comes to esports, which is our other avenue, we acquired the ESL/FaceIt group in 2022. They’ve become a clear leader in esports. For that, the reason we’re optimistic is they operate in live events. We’re increasingly fractionalized in our time and intention. Getting people to spend time on something and stay engaged for a long period of time is hard. But live events is an area where people continue to stay engaged for the long run, whether it’s live sports or music or festivals and so on.

This is a live event that’s growing. From 2022 through today, EFG’s hours watched, the number of hours people watch esports cumulatively, was about 220 million. Today it’s 460 million. Engagement has more than doubled over that time. It’s also a very attractive demographic. The average age of an esports fan is 25.

GamesBeat: Everyone used to talk about an esports winter. Is there a time where you declared that over.

Meschuk: Certainly there have been difficult times for the esports industry. What differentiates us is we’re trying to invest for the long run, over time. We think the fundamentals are there. There’s still long-term audience growth over time. That will in turn be increasingly attractive, not just for game publishers and developers, but also for brand partners who are trying to get young, engaged audiences over the long run. All those factors together, both on the game development side and the developments with Scopely and EFG–there are lots of reasons to be optimistic.

GamesBeat: In this market where we’re still adjusting for post-boom reality, how is Savvy approaching long-term investment strategies and commitment to more lasting value?

Meschuk: Just to talk about where our buckets are, because that can be helpful–we’re a bit of a unique entity. We have game development and publishing, largely driven through Scopely as I mentioned, but also Steer Studios, which is our internal investment studio in Riyadh. Esports, through EFG, and then the third bucket is helping develop the ecosystem in Saudi Arabia, which is a bit of a unique element for a commercial enterprise, to be all about building the industry in the country. We feel like that is a long-term investment that has a lot of opportunity and potential.

We like to call ourselves an economic transformation brand. We’re trying to create opportunity for everyone in the ecosystem. Not just Savvy, but anyone who wants to invest in the industry for the long run. The equivalent to something like that would be like what Tesla did with clean air vehicles. They didn’t just make a good product. They also made infrastructure, the Supercharger network. They built the automated manufacturing plants. They helped with policy around clean air initiatives. At Savvy we’re trying to echo that with education initiatives in the region about games. How do we build the right incentives and onboarding to encourage companies to come to the region? How do we support other game companies and partners to encourage investment in the country? That’s a big portion of our long-term mandate, to help there.

GamesBeat: Backing up a bit for some of the bigger picture, Saudi Arabia needs to diversify. Eventually it could run out of oil. No one knows exactly when that happens, but you need new jobs to eventually replace the generation of jobs that will go away with oil and gas. There’s diversification on all fronts into clean energy as well. But gaming seems to be one of those areas where there’s a chance to create more jobs. That’s the picture. The public investment fund has set aside $37 billion for this purpose. I wonder if they will ever change that number, or increase it?

Meschuk: That would be amazing.

GamesBeat: But it’s an interesting transformational change for the entire country. How do you translate that plan down to the company level with what you do?

Meschuk: We see ourselves as a catalyst and convener helping to make that happen. Gaming is the largest entertainment category in the world. The MENA region is growing at more than 10% a year. Other regions have started to mature a bit. MENA still has a lot of potential. We’re evangelists for that. Trying to find opportunities that make sense for companies here, where there can be a strong partnership opportunity. Our teams work closely with a lot of those companies that are thinking about coming to MENA or Savvy.

We’re also, as I mentioned, trying to work with education initiatives. We have a program called the Savvy Academy that’s all about building skills and helping people learn what it takes to be a game developer. We’re finding other organizations to partner with and help accelerate those programs, because a lot of those already exist here in the west. How can we leverage those? Those are examples of things that we’re doing. We also feel like there’s a great energy there in trying to build the industry. It’ll be a continued focus for us.

GamesBeat: Now that Scopely is so successful with Monopoly Go and has a lot of cash itself, how do you distinguish between the investment strategies of Savvy and Scopely? Is it as simple as you guys do esports and they do mobile games, or is it more complicated?

Meschuk: We see the role of Savvy to be a supporter and enabler. That’s the approach we’ve taken with Scopely. That’s a talented group of people who have proven over many years that they have a strong live services capability. Monopoly Go has been amazingly successful. My favorite stat there is that people have passed Go 175 billion times now. That’s a lot of times around the board.

What we saw there is we look for teams that have compelling visions. They know where they want to go. They have strong capabilities to get there. How can we accelerate that approach? That’s what you’ve seen happen with Scopely, but also in the Niantic deal, which will hopefully close later this year. That’s emblematic of the approach. We’re looking for highly engaged communities, category leaders. Scopely would be one of the only mobile game companies in the world with two top-10 franchises. We see ourselves as supporting and enabling that to happen.

It’s true that we have a broader focus, which includes esports and building the industry in Saudi, but to take a step back, what also differentiates Savvy is a long-term mindset. We’re thinking of the moves we want to make in years and decades, not quarters. We’re trying to think about what will be trends over the next five, 10, 15 years that we want to be a part of. We’re also thinking about–we’re very patient, as a private company. We’re afforded the opportunity to do that by our shareholder.

We’re thinking globally as well. How do we try to build a presence everywhere? Platform-agnostic as well. We don’t have a particular genre or platform that we’re looking to do. We’re just looking for what opportunities make the most sense for us.

GamesBeat: Are there some things you’ve observed at the highest level of the industry where you think trends are going to matter as far as the direction of growth? And your own growth too. What are the biggest things out there?

Meschuk: Regionally we’re still seeing certain regions growing a lot. I mentioned MENA. Southeast Asia, India, those are exhibiting strong growth. Those are interesting places to keep in mind and continue to play. There’s a huge group of super talented developers in the east that have a lot of opportunity to expand and are interested in how to play even bigger outside of their home countries. There are potential opportunities there. We see that there are lots of innovative game modes out there right now. User-generated content, some of the biggest communities in the world right now are generated through UGC. We keep an eye on all of those.

We’re trying to keep our ears to the ground, both with the Savvy teams and the Scopely teams, the EFG teams on everything that’s in the market. When there’s the right opportunity to capitalize we’ll be ready. We’re going to be pretty choosy around where we decide to go. But those are some trends that I think are interesting.

GamesBeat: Looking at Epic vs. Apple and the antitrust suit, if you take the rulings at face value and look at what Apple has to comply with, it does mean that game companies and developers can now advertise that they have lower prices on their own web shops outside of the Apple app store. They can talk about that to consumers, talk about rewards or discounts for them over on the web shops. There’s a chance to foster more direct community contact between developers and gamers. This is probably going to be a fairly chunky trend item to put on everyone’s radar. Maybe mobile gaming is going to be a good growth vector again.

Meschuk: We’re very big on that category, obviously, having such an amazing team at Scopely that has a lot of presence there. This isn’t necessarily a new opportunity. There have been opportunities for that over the last few years. The Scopely team is working on where it’s appropriate to do that. It’s a balancing act. We’re respectful of the strong relationship those teams have with the Apple team and the Google team. Where it makes sense and where there are opportunities, the team will pursue that. But that’s up to Scopely as far as how they will handle that.

GamesBeat: How does Savvy balance entrepreneur and founder autonomy after you do an acquisition deal?

Meschuk: The way I would think about Savvy is we want to be the place the world’s best game entrepreneurs want to be. We want to create an environment in which the best game teams feel like they can thrive in the long term, and feel that this is a good, natural home for them. In order to do that, a lot of those teams are pretty driven, pretty passionate. They understand what they want to do. With that comes an expectation of a certain level of autonomy and independence.

I think we’ve worked really collaboratively with both Scopely and EFG to develop the right mix there, where those teams have strong capabilities and are able to pursue them. But they’re supported by us where needed. In the case of Scopely, it’s really where there are attractive opportunities that we can help in enabling them to take advantage. In the case of EFG it’s also about capitalizing their capabilities to deliver on amazing events like the Esports World Cup that happened last year. More than 150 pro clubs participated and drew more than 500 million views. EFG played an extremely significant role in delivering that. That was exciting as well.

GamesBeat: And the goal is to expand into the Olympics pretty soon.

Meschuk: We’re looking forward to helping make that a reality.

GamesBeat: Is there a reason you think that’s going to be able to take off earliest and first in the Middle East?

Meschuk: You’ve seen that there’s a strong commitment to esports coming out of MENA and Saudi Arabia in particular. The Esports World Cup was a pretty seminal event. The first time you got that many teams together across all those different types of events. It’s become a hub for esports. It’s also providing an opportunity for that part of the industry. At times it’s been difficult to have a more sustainable, predictable environment. It can be a platform from which the industry can continue to stabilize and grow.

GamesBeat: Speaking of unique things about different regions, Black Myth: Wukong was extremely successful for its Chinese developer last year. They sold 25 million units of a game that was focused on Chinese culture that also appealed to players on a global stage. What kind of lesson do you think that has for Savvy?

Meschuk: That was an incredible lesson. It showed that local games, local to the culture, the mythology–the Journey to the West is super well-known in China and elsewhere. If you do that well at triple-A quality, not only does it resonate locally, but it also tends to resonate with a lot of other players. They also took a game mode that’s historically been pretty difficult and made it very accessible. The lesson there is that players are looking for localized experiences that appeal to their local culture, but if you do that well it has broad appeal.

There’s a lot of lessons for us. When you look at different regions–in the Middle East there’s millennia of history there, a lot of lore and stories. There are more than 300 million Arabic speakers around the world. It would be great to have a similar experience there one day. But other regions as well–you have more than 500 million people that speak Hindi, or 1.2 billion that speak Mandarin. You’ll see that the more localized some of these games get–I think that’s a trend we’ll continue to see.

GamesBeat: Amir Satvat has data on where jobs are at in the game industry right now. He sees a closer equilibrium between hiring and firing in the first quarter than we’ve seen for 30 months before, when it was more tilted toward layoffs and cutbacks than hiring. We have trends toward smaller teams and more outsourcing. There’s an interesting challenge in the question of how you can create jobs in Saudi Arabia while these other forces are affecting the broader industry.

Meschuk: You bring up a few things there. One is the power of small teams. More than ever, there’s an ability for smaller teams to be successful, using outsourcing as well as other co-development to amplify their capabilities. You’ve seen some small teams develop very successful games. That’s a positive trend. It creates more opportunity for more IP to be created, more new ideas to be brought to the forefront. Over time that creates more growth for the industry. That’s a positive thing.

As far as what impact it has in Saudi Arabia as a region, we’re committed to continuing to invest there. It’s going to require a few things. It’s going to require ongoing education, so that there’s an endemic talent base there. It’s going to require the right incentives for people to come in. It’s doable. Saudi Arabia has a population the same size as Canada. Canada, over a couple of decades, built an extremely robust games industry. You’ll see a similar level of investment on an accelerated scale to try to do that. We’re excited to play a role in that.

GamesBeat: I’ve been to Saudi Arabia a couple of times now. It’s a fascinating place. I do wonder how you supply the answers to people when they decide to take jobs and move there. It can be a controversial conversation. Why Saudi Arabia?

Meschuk: A few years ago that was a question a lot of people would ask. Now we’ve seen a lot more transformation. You’ve seen a real aggressive modernization. It’s more a question of why not? It’s a growing region. It’s very open to games. It has a national strategy on games and esports that’s quite aggressive, which is great. In a time when the industry may not have as much investment elsewhere, there has been a lot of opportunity.

From my own personal experience, being there quite a bit now, it’s a place with a strong energy in building the culture of games. I love this quote by Jeff Bezos: “You don’t need mercenaries. You need missionaries.” There’s a lot of people who are missionaries, who are committed to building the industry from the ground up. That’s what it takes. We’ve seen, just in our own recruiting, a lot of people that are interested in going to the region. That might not have been the case a few years back.

GamesBeat: Where do you think the industry is going? What are the biggest opportunities you see?

Meschuk: As I mentioned before, the best opportunities are to be found where some of these largest engaged communities are going to be. You’re seeing strong trends in things like user-generated content, in growing regions. The games business as a category is still really appealing. It’s the largest entertainment category in the world, let’s not forget. Last year there were 140 billion hours of playtime in games. There’s still a lot of exciting things happening in the industry.

It’s still about developing a great game, one that can engage people over the long run. If you look at the top 10 games this year versus the top 10 games last year versus three years ago, the names on that list don’t always change all that frequently. What that shows is that if you get the formula right, you can have engagement for many years to come. The tricky thing is, how do you build that? And I think you build that by acquiring amazing talent, empowering them to do what they do best, and continuing to support them with the things they need to continue to make great experiences. I don’t know that there’s a magic formula to know exactly where the growth is. But it centers around finding the best talent.

We’re excited about opportunities in the future. We know that there are a lot of opportunities to partner together. Savvy is an organization that wants the whole industry to succeed. We’ve had a lot of great conversations this week. We’re open to partnering with everyone to make that happen and support everyone along in the process.