Savvy Games Group is focused on its own growth instead of reading economic tea leaves | Brian Ward

The game industry is in the midst of recovering from tough times, but Savvy Games Group is staying focused on making it’s own growth happen rather than worrying about the game economy.

That’s the gist of my interview with Brian Ward, CEO of Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group, during the Game Developers Conference. Ward noted that Savvy-owned Scopely just announced its $3.5 billion acquisition of Niantic, the maker of Pokemon Go.

For the time being, that means Savvy’s Scopely division will be busy integrating the two companies together. But Savvy will still focus on growth with its various game properties, ranging from esports to mobile games. Delivering growth is a big priority for Saudi Arabia, which is trying to create jobs for the next generation as the country embraces games and weans itself from the oil economy.

And given the layoffs that have wiped out 35,000 jobs in the past 2.5 years in games, Savvy Games Group may have an easier time attracting game companies to Saudi Arabia and convincing big companies that they should join the Savvy fold like Scopely and Niantic have done.

Rather than focus on everything, Ward told me that Savvy will focus on games, esports, and ecosystem-building in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How is the strategy coming along for you? Any interesting milestones?

Brian Ward: Our focus for the last year and a bit, year and a half, has been trying to find, through the lens of Scopely, genre-leading or category-leading titles, or teams capable of making such titles. Now we’ve landed on Niantic. We’re happy about that. Now we have some work to do, or Scopely does, to integrate.

GamesBeat: It felt like the addition of Niantic was something a big company would do to make sure that it has the depth to keep growth going. It has a big game. If you invest in tiny startups, they take a long time to sprout. You never know when they’ll contribute to cash flow the way that big game does. But buying something that’s almost like an annuity–Pokemon Go feels like something that guarantees growth is going to stay there.

Ward: Yeah. It’s such a durable audience.

GamesBeat: Does it feel like that’s some of the Scopely thinking? If you’re this big, you have to buy something big.

Ward: $150 million deals don’t move the needle anymore for Scopely.

GamesBeat: How does that strategy play out over time?

Ward: We have a great degree of confidence now in how we all work together to enable Scopely to sign this deal for the Niantic games business. That confidence gives us hope that we’ll be able to find something else over the next little while. It won’t be immediate, because we have a lot of work to do on this one. But continuing to look for another genre-leading, category-leading title in the future. That part of the strategy will remain for the foreseeable future.

Continuing to improve the esports business and execute on these big tournaments, whether it’s the Esports World Cup again this year or the inaugural Esports Olympics. That’s another important part of the strategy. And of course the third pillar is helping other parties in Saudi Arabia build the games and esports ecosystem there into a global hub.

GamesBeat: I heard from the IGDA people that the Riyadh chapter is becoming one of their biggest. People are enthusiastically participating in IGDA events there. I know that Finland used to be their most active chapter in the past, partly because everyone there was very collegial. They had that mindset where they weren’t competing with each other for Finnish players, because the market there is so small. They were all focused on success in the wider world. The Finns liked to share things they’d learned. That made for an active IGDA chapter. Is that some of the feeling in Riyadh?

Ward: There’s a lot of enthusiasm amongst Saudis for our sector. Of course they’re very passionate about games and esports, highly engaged. Many see an opportunity in the transformation of the country for getting engaged in entrepreneurial endeavors, like starting a game developer or something else. I’m not surprised that it’s grown, because there hasn’t been the infrastructure before. Now we start to see some of that infrastructure being developed to support people in their ambitions.

GamesBeat: Does it feel like there’s course correcting happening in any particular ways?

Ward: I wouldn’t say we’re moving in new directions. We’ve become more focused in how we describe our strategies and the pillars of our strategy. We started with these five companies and now we’re down to three strategic pillars around games, esports, and KSA ecosystem-building. That makes it easier to execute, as opposed to the structure before. But the emphasis is the same. The mandate is the same. The strategy is the same.

We’re being maybe a bit more relaxed, I guess, and selective in the deployment of capital. It’s not a race to deploy capital. I felt, when I first went there, that it was important to get some deals done and put some points on the board, to achieve something. Then we achieved some things. Now we want to be disciplined about how we execute going forward.

GamesBeat: When it comes to growing the jobs base, how is that proceeding? How important is that?

Ward: It’s going well. We have more than 150 people now in Riyadh, between Steer Studios, which is close to 100 people, and Marai, which is the Scopely entity with about 25 people in QA, and EFG, which has about 25, maybe slightly more, on esports. We have our headquarters people. Obviously we’re not trying to grow headcount in non-revenue-generating roles. We’ve hired all the people we think we need at the parent company. But we’re very keen to enable the growth of Marai and EFG and Steer.

GamesBeat: Do you feel like adding more startups, seeding a startup ecosystem in a bigger way?

Ward: I don’t think it’s our role at the moment to seed startups. But there is room in the ecosystem for that sort of incubation and acceleration and funding mechanism. It’s just not part of our current menu.

GamesBeat: I’ve seen a couple of efforts in Dubai for more of that, and Abu Dhabi as well. Do you feel like there’s competition between you and other parts of the region in that area?

Ward: I think there’s a healthy degree of respect and enthusiasm across the region for what everyone is doing. There’s a bit of a theory that a rising tide lifts all boats. There’s also some fun competitiveness. Who doesn’t like good competition? The folks in Abu Dhabi are doing a great job. Dubai is starting to step into it in a big way. Good competition makes you want to raise your game.

GamesBeat: It’s a part of the world where jobs are growing. The rest of the gaming world seems iffy. Is that an interesting dynamic for you? Does that affect your thinking?

Ward: There’s lots of opportunity. We’re trying to accelerate. We’ve been pretty successful at attracting foreign companies to have a look at the Middle East and understand the MENA market, the size of it, the monetizability of it, and to then come to Riyadh and understand what it would take to set up there and service that market, as well as the global market.

GamesBeat: What form do you expect the esports events to take this year? Are the Olympics and World Cup going to be separate events, or are they together in some way?

Ward: No, those are separate things. Esports Olympics and World Cup are two separate things. Esports World Cup will be held again in Riyadh starting in early July and going through late August, ending with this great summit. Everyone comes to Riyadh at the end of August now, right after Gamescom. They’ve added more titles to the roster for World Cup this year.

Esports Olympics, the inaugural version of that, will be in 2027. Of course that’s a completely different type of tournament, because it’s nation-based, as the Olympics are in traditional sports, compared to club-, team-, and title-based competitions in traditional esports. It’s two completely different concepts, and different timelines as well. The first Olympics will be in Riyadh, but the future is still to be determined.

GamesBeat: Do you think Qiddiya would be ready by that time?

Ward: That’s a good question for Qiddiya. I don’t know. It’s possible. To the extent that they’ve asked us for feedback on the games and esports district, which was quite a while ago, we provided all that. We gave them feedback on the amount of accommodation required, office space and different elements of design and planning. We’re still in touch with them and on a couple of committees together. We talk to each other fairly frequently.

GamesBeat: The struggles that gaming has gone through in the last couple of years, do you see reasons for recovery, or reasons the industry might stay in a difficult state?

Ward: Everything comes around to find an equilibrium eventually. There are still 3.4 billion gamers on the planet. That number is growing. People love to be entertained. They’ve been playing games since the dawn of humanity. I don’t think that will go away. Hopefully soon we’ll get through this–there are all sorts of challenges. Mobile has certain challenges. PC and console have certain challenges. There are jurisdictional challenges, geopolitical stuff going on. But I don’t think there’s any reason to be pessimistic in the long term.

GamesBeat: With the Switch 2 coming into the market, how big a factor do you think that becomes? New hardware used to drive the economic cycles in gaming, but now gaming is broader. I’m not sure what effect a new console has.

Ward: Nintendo is an amazing company. It’s always been astonishingly successful around a small number of titles. The only people successful on Nintendo systems have been Nintendo, essentially. That’s not strictly true, but it’s largely true. A great deal of respect for those guys. I’m interested to see how Switch 2 works out. But you’re right. The market is so much broader now. Out of those 3.4 billion gamers, there are only 200 million playing on consoles.

GamesBeat: Matthew Ball wrote about 11 things he highlighted as things that could provide growth. Backing up, he pointed out eight things, like cloud gaming, that were supposed to provide growth but didn’t. And then there were 10 things that drove gaming for a decade or more and came to an end. He threw all these things in the air that are affecting games. But I wonder if there’s a narrower set of things you think about more, things that could bring growth back.

Ward: We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about industry growth in and of itself. We’re focused on executing our strategy toward our mandate on those three strategic pillars. While we look at all the trends in what’s happening, the vagaries of the PC and console market versus mobile and so forth, we don’t spend much time concerning ourselves with macro trends. We’re looking at how to execute against our particular pillars.

We’re aided by being able to ignore some of the short-term stuff. We have a very long-term view because we’re a private company with very long-dated, patient capital from our shareholder. We can afford to be 10-years-plus in our outlook, as opposed to listed companies who might be more concerned with quarterly earnings and so forth.

GamesBeat: One thing that seemed pretty real from Ball’s analysis was his discussion of Black Myth: Wukong. For China it meant they could finally make triple-A games. For Netease in particular, it suggested they needed to invest more in Chinese game studios than western studios. They’re making a retreat from the west and making more investment in local content that can then go to a global stage. Does that get you thinking as well? Can you make Middle Eastern content that has global appeal?

Ward: That’s one of the great longer-term opportunities out of MENA. Just as in the far east, great stories in our media have been told based on the ancient lore and culture of the region. There are great stories to be told out of the Middle East. It’s the cradle of humanity in some ways. Those stories haven’t been told. We’ve barely even scratched the surface on localization, let alone telling some of those great stories. In the long term that’s a great opportunity.