interested. This is different from Tencent, different from everybody else. What got me to take the job was going to Riyadh and seeing the transformation for myself. How it’s modernising. I thought, ‘Okay, this is a real thing’. It’s quite a unique opportunity. That’s what attracted
me and attracted most of the other westerners. Once you go to Riyadh, you see it for yourself. This is a national strategy. They’re on a bullet train to the future, like China 30 years ago in terms of pace of change. Now I want to help build a great company, hopefully do some good for the industry, and help some people transform their country. That opportunity doesn’t come around very often. That’s what a lot of people are responding to.
You spent $1 billion on the ESL in 2022. What exactly did it get you? What was the motivation behind that? In the strategy that we started with, there was a heavy emphasis on esports, AAA, PC and console games. Coming out of COVID-19, a lot of what we would have expected to develop over five years was accelerated. I think society generally felt like it was at an inflection point with esports and like it was going to go beyond what it had traditionally been. Monetisation was not enormous yet in the space, but we decided to try to accelerate some of that consolidation that we felt was going to be inevitable and try to establish a leadership position.
When you say consolidation, who do you think are the primary rivals to the ESL that are consolidating in a similar way? I don’t think there’s anybody really consolidating yet, but I think there are a lot of technology companies and developers with interesting offerings that will get acquired by other bigger publishers, while some publishers will also figure out in what direction their esports strategy goes. So there was an opportunity to try to put a stake in the ground, and try and improve the product portfolio of ESL, by combining to put in the capital to improve the live experience and the broadcast experience and then hopefully improve monetisation there. We hope to possibly leapfrog some of the other people who have a more short term view.
You’ve said you want to invest $30 billion over the next five years. In what countries, and in what activities? Worldwide. The fund has made direct investments into publishers, developers, and tech companies adjacent to our spaces. Minority investments and majority. Secondly, the fund will make –and has made – indirect investments in partnership with VCs and private equity firms and figured out some intelligent and direct investments together. There’s also the publisher investments that the PIF made itself, both before and after Savvy was established. Those will fold into the fund sometime over the next few months and we’ll be trying to operationalise those in a more substantive
44 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2023
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