Electronic Arts has been a private company for barely a month, and its new owner is already reportedly weighing what to do with it. According to people familiar with the discussions, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is considering merging EA into Savvy Games Group, the PIF’s other major gaming vehicle — a move that would combine the world’s largest games publisher with a company that already owns Scopely, ESL FACEIT Group, and Steer Studios.

Two PIF gaming bets, one company?

PIF closed its $55 billion take-private acquisition of EA on August 4, 2026, in what remains the largest leveraged buyout in history. That deal put EA under a consortium in which PIF holds a 93.4% stake. Separately, PIF has spent years building Savvy Games Group into its own gaming conglomerate: Savvy bought Monopoly Go developer Scopely for $4.9 billion, backed a $3.5 billion purchase of Niantic’s games business (including Pokémon GO), and controls the esports operator ESL FACEIT Group.

Folding EA into that structure would put Battlefield, FC, The Sims, and Apex Legends under the same roof as Scopely’s mobile lineup and Savvy’s esports holdings — theoretically the largest single gaming company in the world by publisher output. People familiar with the talks say the motivation is coordination: PIF wants its various gaming investments working together rather than operating as separate, occasionally overlapping bets.

Nothing decided, and a bigger deal in the way

No final decision has reportedly been made, and any EA-Savvy combination isn’t expected to move before Savvy finishes a deal already in progress: its roughly $6 billion acquisition of Moonton, the Shanghai-based developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, which Savvy agreed to buy from ByteDance in March. That deal alone would push Savvy’s mobile portfolio deeper into Southeast Asia and Latin America, where Mobile Legends has built a large player base, before PIF even turns to the more complicated question of merging in a company the size of EA.

The timing is also unusual because EA and Savvy have history that didn’t go smoothly: a previously reported development partnership between the two worth more than $2 billion in contracted revenue collapsed, with Savvy walking away from it. Whatever friction that created evidently hasn’t ruled out a much larger combination now that PIF owns both sides.

A leadership shuffle at Savvy

The merger talk surfaced amid a change at the top of Savvy itself. Brian Ward, who had led Savvy Games Group since its founding in November 2021, stepped down as CEO on September 1 — twelve days after the EA buyout closed. Turqi Alnowaiser, PIF’s deputy governor and head of its international investments division, has taken over as interim CEO. Alnowaiser isn’t a new face in this story: he was also the PIF executive who fronted the EA acquisition itself, which makes his move into Savvy’s top job read as more than a coincidence to people watching PIF’s gaming strategy.

Ward had overseen roughly $38 billion in PIF gaming commitments during his tenure, building Savvy from a holding company into an operator with real studios and live products. His exit right as merger discussions emerge leaves Savvy being run, at least for now, by the same PIF official who just spent a year closing the EA deal.

Why this would matter for players

A combined EA-Savvy wouldn’t change what shows up in a store this year — nothing here is close to finalized, and PIF has said the Moonton deal comes first. But the structural implications are larger than the EA buyout alone. EA going private under PIF was framed at the time as a financial transaction: new ownership, same publisher, an $18 billion debt load to service. Merging EA into an operating company that already runs mobile studios and an esports league is a different kind of move — it starts to look like consolidation of PIF’s entire gaming footprint into a single industrial-scale operator, with EA’s console and PC franchises sitting alongside Scopely’s mobile hits and ESL’s competitive circuits.

It also raises the obvious follow-on questions that come with any big merger: whether EA retains its own leadership and brand identity inside a larger Savvy structure, whether studios get reshuffled to reduce overlap, and whether a combined entity changes how aggressively PIF pursues further acquisitions in the sector. None of that is answered yet, and PIF hasn’t commented publicly on the reported discussions.

For the full financial breakdown of how EA ended up under PIF control in the first place, see our coverage of EA’s $55 billion take-private buyout. And for the broader trend of sovereign wealth money reshaping the industry’s ownership structure, our look at gaming’s record profits, record layoffs paradox covers the financial pressure many of these newly consolidated companies are operating under.