This is not a market nibbling at the edges of global entertainment. It is engineering itself to sit at its centre.

There is a tendency in publishing to watch the gaming industry from a polite distance — acknowledging its scale, occasionally noting a lucrative IP deal, then returning to more familiar anxieties.

Saudi Arabia is about to make that distance untenable.

Make no mistake. The Kingdom’s National Gaming and Esports Strategy, launched in 2022, is not a vanity project dressed up in Vision 2030 language.

It targets SAR 50 billion (approximately $13.3 billion) in GDP contribution and 39,000 new jobs by 2030, backed by a population of more than 25.8 million gamers – 67% of Saudis – and a market that reached $1.19 billion in revenues in 2024 and is projected to hit $1.64 billion by 2028.

Savvy Games Group the Public Investment Fund’s gaming subsidiary, has committed $37.8 billion to sector development. Recent moves include the $4.9 billion acquisition of Scopely in 2023 and Scopely’s own $3.5 billion purchase of Niantic’s games division.

The PIF is also transferring approximately $12 billion in gaming equity stakes – holdings in Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive and Square Enix – into Savvy’s stewardship. This is not a market nibbling at the edges of global entertainment. It is engineering itself to sit at its centre.

What makes this directly relevant to publishing is not the money alone. It is the creative infrastructure being built around it, and the role AI is playing in that construction.

AI Across the Value Chain

Local studios – among them Steer Studios , Fahy Studios and Starvania Studio – are deploying AI across asset production, localisation workflows and dialogue generation.

The significance here is not efficiency alone. These are studios working explicitly to preserve cultural context whilst accelerating global market entry. That combination – AI-assisted speed, culturally grounded storytelling – should resonate with any publisher attempting to serve multilingual, multi-regional audiences. The tools being refined in Riyadh and Jeddah will not stay there.

Publishing platforms Nine66 and Sandsoft are using AI-driven analytics to predict player lifetime value, optimise marketing campaigns and manage communities – tools that map, with relatively little adaptation, onto reader engagement, subscription retention and audience segmentation challenges that digital publishing has been wrestling with for years.

The ESL FACEIT Group – EFG, acquired by Savvy for approximately $1.5 billion, has integrated AI moderation through a system called Minerva, which analyses player communications to identify toxic behaviour.

Meanwhile, Esports Infra – developed in partnership with Saudi AI firm Wakeb – applies machine learning to talent scouting and skill classification, claiming efficiency improvements of up to 50% in team building.

The underlying pattern: AI taking on the analytical and administrative load so that human judgment can be reserved for decisions that genuinely require it. That is not a gaming-specific insight. It is the argument that publishing’s more thoughtful AI adopters have been making for several years, often in the teeth of considerable institutional resistance.

The Content Ecosystem Question

Saudi Arabia is also building the physical infrastructure to match. The Qiddiya Esports and Gaming District is targeting 10 million annual visitors by 2030 – a content destination on a scale that invites comparison not with theme parks but with media cities.

Here’s the thing: Where footfall of that magnitude gathers around narrative-driven entertainment, publishing’s opportunity is not peripheral. World-building at gaming scale generates demand for extended universe content: fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, educational tie-ins, cultural histories.

The question for publishers is whether they are positioned to supply that demand, or whether gaming studios will develop their own content arms – as several already have.

This is where the MENA region’s particular dynamics matter. Arabic-language publishing has historically underserved its readership relative to population size and literacy rates. A gaming boom centred on culturally specific Saudi and broader Arab narratives creates a content gap that traditional publishing is, in principle, well-placed to fill.

But only if it can move with sufficient speed and cultural intelligence. The AI localisation workflows being developed in Saudi studios are precisely the tools that could accelerate Arabic-language publishing more broadly, reducing the friction that has historically made translation economics unfavourable.

The Broader Lesson: Embracing Rather Than Demonising

Embracing AI, that is.

The Saudi gaming sector’s relationship with AI is instrumental and unsentimental. Executives in the space are quoted emphasising that competitive advantage derives not from technology adoption per se, but from clarity about use cases. The International Esports Federation prohibits AI from influencing live matches, restricting its role to analytical and administrative functions – a boundary that reflects considered governance rather than panic or trying to avoid the wrath of the Luddite Fringe.

This is a markedly different posture from the one that has characterised much of publishing’s public AI debate, where a significant portion of the discourse has been consumed by categorical knee-jerk opposition from the Fringe, genuine legal anxiety and, in some corners, a conflation of legitimate copyright concerns with a broader rejection of the technology.

The Saudi gaming industry is not naive about risk. It is, however, getting on with it.

Shifting Centres of Gravity

Global publishing’s centre of gravity has been shifting for years – away from the Anglo-American axis and toward Asia, the Arab world, Africa, and a multipolar constellation of emerging markets.

Those of us who have argued that case for some time find it periodically satisfying to watch the evidence accumulate.

Saudi Arabia’s gaming strategy is one more data point: a non-Western market not waiting for Western publishing to notice it, but building the content infrastructure, the analytical tools and the financial muscle to shape global narrative on its own terms.

Publishers who treat this as someone else’s story are misreading both the map and the moment. The console and the codex have more in common than the industry’s siloed thinking tends to allow – and in Riyadh, the distance between them is closing faster than most London or New York editorial meetings have yet registered.

This post first appeared in the TNPS Analysis newsletter.