Savvy owns big stakes in gaming's giants, but says it isn't pushing to change them

PLUS: Xbox Helix dev kits arrive in 2027 and Nintendo's U.S. tariff suit is paused

SAN FRANCISCO - Savvy Games, the Saudi government-funded gaming conglomerate headquartered in Riyadh, does not plan to use its newfound shares in some of the world’s biggest game companies to push for major changes in those publishers, Savvy chief Brian Ward said in a talk at GDC.

Earlier this year, Savvy assumed control of some $12 billion worth of stock in Nintendo, Take Two, Square Enix, and others major firms, per Bloomberg and Reuters reports of public filings.

Over the last few years, those stock purchases had initially been made directly by the Saudi kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, which recently transferred them to Savvy.

The stakes range from 5-10% of the companies, making Savvy one of the biggest shareholders of each.

“It gives us probably a little bit better opportunity to collaborate with those companies,” Ward said, but denied that Savvy was going to pressure the gaming giants to change their strategies.

“We’re not in any hurry to to make any changes. We haven't proposed anything. We don’t have anything on the books.”

Ward instead described the shares as an investment that gives Savvy added liquidity to help finance potential future mergers and acquisitions. Though he said Savvy didn’t “have a big target in mind at the moment.” (Savvy is already rumored to be interested in ByteDance’s Moonton mobile game studio, but Ward wouldn’t comment on that at GDC).

Savvy has previously invested in Swedish gaming conglomerate The Embracer Group, where Ward now is a member of its board of directors.

Since 2022, Savvy has had a mandate from the kingdom to invest $38 billion in gaming. It has spend much of it has on the purchase of esports organizations and the mobile gaming companies Scopely (Monopoly Go) and Niantic (Pokémon Go). I interviewed Ward in 2022 about the Savvy project and the controversies around its Saudi backing.

Ward said he did not know if Savvy would be involved in Electronic Arts, should the company’s $55 billion plan to go private, largely funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, clears regulatory hurdles.

Ward’s talk was featured in GDC’s new Luminaries sessions, held at a theater across the street from the big halls packed with thousands of GDC showgoers. In front of a small gathering of a few dozen people, Ward was interviewed on stage by Bloomberg’s tech executive editor Tom Giles. Giles began the session by acknowledging that many people on Ward’s team are in a region that is now the location of an “increasingly global conflict.” He said he hoped the Savvy team was faring okay.

“I was in Riyadh last week, where we’re based, for several days after the initial bombings in Iran, and Riyadh was fine,” Ward said.

He added: “Hopefully it de-escalates in the areas that have been more adversely affected.”

In a separate interview with a Bloomberg reporter that was published yesterday, Ward said: “It’s obviously not helpful for the region to have this escalation and it will change probably or cool the perception of it as being a stable and quiet place where people want to go.”

Saudi Arabia’s multi-billon dollar push into gaming has included extravagant live events in Riyadh, including the now-annual Esports World Cup, which is slated to kick off on July 6.

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Item 2: In brief…

🧬 Microsoft plans to deliver early development kits for its next console, codenamed Helix, starting in 2027, the company announced at GDC yesterday.

• Xbox’s head of next gen, Jason Ronald, also teased that “we’re committed to keeping games from four generations of Xbox playable for years to come. As part of our 25th anniversary later this year, we’ll be rolling out new ways to play some of the most iconic games from our past.”

Epic Games has increased the price of V-Bucks, the virtual money used in Fortnite, with $9 getting you 800 V-Bucks, when it previously would have converted to 1,000.

• Epic said: "The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills.”

👀 Nintendo’s lawsuit against the U.S. government over the Trump administration’s tariffs has been automatically stayed, or paused, according to an update to the case issued on Tuesday.

• Nintendo is one of hundreds of companies that sued the U.S. in the Court of International Trade. Last December, a judge on the CIT ordered that all such cases would be automatically stayed pending the results of a tariff case that had made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court then ruled in February that the tariffs were illegal.

• Two days before Nintendo’s suit was filed, a judge in the trade court ruled that companies impacted by tariffs should receive refunds. Those refunds could be issued starting in April, but many companies have yet to say if they’ll pass the money on to consumers, Popular Info notes. (A Nintendo rep did not directly say whether the company planned to pass refunds along to its customers, when asked about it by Game File last week.)

🎮 Another veteran Nintendo developer, this time WarioWare series lead creator Goro Abe, has left the company, continuing a wave of Nintendo retirements, VGC reports.

• Abe had been making games for Nintendo since 2001’s Wario Land 4 and says he plans to now teach at a university and make smaller games.

🚫 Actors union SAG-AFTRA has issued a “do not work” notice against Capcom’s upcoming Mega Man: Dual Override game, after previous Mega Man voice actor Ben Diskin said Capcom had asked him to return to the role but without a union contract.

🗽 Valve has responded to the state of New York’s lawsuit alleging that the company’s video game loot boxes violate gambling laws, in a letter posted to Steam addressed to gamers in the state.

• The Steam and Counter-Strike maker likens its in-game loot boxes to physical goods that are sold without first revealing their contents: “baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu.”

• Valve characterizes itself as a responsible actor against illegal gambling: “To date we've locked over one million Steam accounts that were being misused by third parties in connection with gambling, fraud, and theft.”

• The company says it has cooperated with New York’s investigation since 2023 and says that some of the state’s suggested remedies—including making digital good non-transferable and gathering more personal information from customers—are unacceptable.

🤔 European video game rating agency PEGI will require new games with loot boxes, likely including EA’s popular FC football/soccer series, to be rated for players 16 and up, The Verge reports.

😮 A new five-hour video interview with Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan, includes his horror story about quitting Blizzard after allegedly being given unreasonable performance goals, and a tease for a new game he’s working on, a survival-shooter multiplayer western called The Legend of California.

🏆 Upcoming, tile-matching, kingdom-building, comedic narrative game Titanium Court won the grand prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival Awards on Wednesday evening. Kotaku has the full list of winners.