I finally wrote about the Saudi-EA deal

Electronic Arts. Cristiano Ronaldo. Nikola “NiKo” Kovač. Esports as an industry. The company behind Pokémon GO. Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. and even Bill Burr. What do these things all have in common? If you answered They’ve all been bought or invested in or paid huge sums by entities in Saudi Arabia, you’re right! But also… weren’t all of these things just plainly better¹ two, five, 10, even 20 years ago?

When Electronic Arts announced that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund et al. were seeking to acquire the company for $55 billion, I could feel a theory forming: that Saudi Arabia seems drawn to shiny objects that are maybe just past their sell-by date. I ran that theory past some smart people and wrote about it for The Washington Post, where I work. There are some new details in there too, if you squint. (I don’t think anyone has reported the plans for Saudi Arabia’s “Anime World” in Qiddiya, though they’re not exactly private, you just have to know where to look.)

🔗 You can read my piece here. My deep thanks to the folks who agreed to talk to me for this story.

(I’d also like to shout out the WorldView newsletter where the piece ran. It features a thrice-weekly column from global affairs writer Ishaan Tharoor and links to other international news stories from The Post. On weekdays I help put the newsletter together. You should subscribe!)

Here, I’d like to share a few quotes that were left on the cutting room floor and some tweet-length observations that don’t make sense in the context of a general interest column in The Post.

1: Not everyone agreed with my theory.

One of my first bits of outreach was to Niko Partners, the video game market research firm with a global practice that counts EA among its clients.

The PIF’s “long-term plan includes succeeding in the future convergence of esports, real world sports, and video game sports, among other things,” Lisa Hanson, CEO of Niko Partners, told me. The theory, which the firm outlined in a blog post of its own, is that the deal slots in perfectly with Saudi Arabia’s ongoing investments in sports and entertainment.

“EA is great at sports games, such as EA FC, EA College Football, and more,” Hanson said. “The Saudi PIF has invested in real world sports, esports, and video games. Examples of these are golf (LIV Golf), F1 racing, professional football (soccer), and esports (Esports World Cup, Esports Nations Cup).” It’s a natural fit.

2: I have reservations about EA’s reputation.

EA makes for an awkward crown jewel.² I think the following description from Nathan Brown, a consultant and long-time video game journalist, is spot on.

“EA today,” wrote Brown, “is a house of aggressively monetised, live-service, content-treadmill sports-game stuff. The occasional breakout hits — games that have managed to amass large, loyal followings of mostly decent people, like Apex, Split Fiction and The Sims 4 — have felt more about luck than judgement, the exceptions that prove the rule.”

3: The idea that Saudi Arabia’s image around the world might materially improve from financing games is still just a hypothesis.

This was one of my first questions about this whole thing. If the point of this is reputation laundering (more on this below) it’s not obvious that the money spent here achieves that.

“The people that are playing MONOPOLY GO! probably have no idea,” said Stephen Totilo of Game File. “They see they Go to Jail, Do Not Pass Go, and ... they’re not thinking that any of this has anything to do with Saudi Arabia. Why would they?”

But Totilo also offered the example of a mysterious, possibly (?) Saudi-linked expansion to 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage set in 9th century Al-Ula, an ancient Arabian city in what is now Saudi Arabia. Ubisoft has kept uncharacteristically mum about the expansion, as Totilo has reported, telling him that the update “was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations.”

“Whether people see a logo that says this was brought to you by Saudi Arabia or not almost doesn't matter,” Totilo told me. “What is more likely is that people will appreciate that they got an expansion to a game they love for free. That will make them feel good. … If you feel, as a kingdom, that you are in some way a disfavored or even a pariah state internationally, this is the kind of thing that erodes that resistance to your kingdom. This is the kind of thing that makes people potentially just feel like you're a normal country.”

4: Maybe reputation laundering isn’t the best lens through which to view this

One mistake I’ve made before in thinking about Saudi acquisitions is overestimating how important “sportswashing” is as a frame.

“There is an element of reputation laundering, of brand management,” said Karim Zidan, the sports and dictators fellow at the New York-based Human Rights Foundation who spoke with me for my Post story. “But … they don't care about the rights abuses. They'll continue to commit rights abuses. As a matter of fact, the rights abuses have only increased in the years that MBS has been in power, de facto in power in Saudi Arabia. There are more executions. The police force is far more powerful. … To me these are not signs of a country that is really attempting reputation laundering.”

Also, in most of the ways that matter to Saudi Arabia, the country’s place on the global stage has already been restored.

“In a combative session with reporters, Trump, sitting alongside Mohammed, praised Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and dismissed Khashoggi’s killing,” wrote my colleague Ishaan in November, on the occasion of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s visit to Washington. “‘Things happen,’ [Trump] shrugged, insisting that he didn’t hold the prince responsible despite a U.S. intelligence report assessing the opposite. Mohammed was received with great pomp and ceremony, including a military flyover and what amounted to a de facto state dinner for the youthful scion, attended by a coterie of top tech and business leaders. The summit marked a continuation of former president Joe Biden’s embrace of the Saudis, whom successive U.S. administrations have come to view as essential to U.S. interests in the region[.]”

5: I am keeping an open mind about the funniest possible outcomes

A running joke of mine is that everyone in games and esports who does business with Saudi Arabia is defrauding the Saudi royal family. Both industries are in pretty rough shape, so anyone who gets the Saudi sovereign wealth fund to overpay for a distressed asset in a flailing industry is doing leftist direct action against the kingdom as far as I’m concerned. (This is a joke. I’m joking.)

Fate has a funny sense of humor, so we should expect any of the following things to happen now: Gen Z turns against sports, making that part of EA’s portfolio worthless. MBS tanks EA and the Kingdom’s reputation by commissioning a terrible vanity JRPG that everyone hates. The Sims radicalizes some lesser Saudi princes in favor of libertine Western cultural norms. Maybe Saudi Arabia really does create the next Minecraft, and its diversification from oil and gas succeeds, improbably, on the back of an out-of-nowhere viral success by, of all companies, Electronic Arts. Or maybe the deal fails! I’m just spitballing.

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1  I’ll admit this is a pretty squishy metric.

2  I wanted to call it the powerhouse behind all your favorite “another one of these?” franchises but that dubious honor belongs to Ubisoft.