Saudi investment fund acquires mobile game maker Scopely for 4.5 billion

Savvy Games Group wants to acquire game publisher and developer Scopely for 4.48 billion euros. Savvy, which is part of an investment fund of Saudi Arabia, and Scopely have concluded an agreement on this. Scopely mainly makes free-to-play franchise games.

Savvy Games, which is part of the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, writes that it has entered into an agreement with Scopely. This will cost 4.9 billion dollars or 4.48 billion euros. Scopely will ‘continue to operate autonomously’ under Savvy’s name. The acquisition is subject to approval by market authorities.

Scopely is a well-known name in the world of mobile games. The publisher and developer mainly makes free-to-play games such as battle royale game Stumble Guys and various classic games such as Yahtzee, Scrabble and Go. After the acquisition, Scopely mainly wants to ‘improve and expand existing franchises and address new player groups with new gaming experiences’.

The acquisition is one of the largest in the gaming world to date. Financially, only a handful of acquisitions have yielded more. Saudi Arabia already announced last year that it wanted to pay a lot of money for ‘a large game publisher’, but no names or concrete plans were mentioned yet. At the time, the country was talking about an amount of 13.6 billion euros. It is unclear whether the investment fund wants to make more acquisitions in the gaming sector in the long term.