摘要：石油王国正在游戏领域掀起一场豪掷千金的“像素革命”。从550亿美元鲸吞《FIFA》母公司EA，到让C罗化身格斗游戏角色，沙特主权基金正以惊人速度构建其游戏帝国。这不仅是资本的狂欢，更是这个海湾国家摆脱石油依赖、塑造未来形象的宏图缩影。当游戏内容开始承载国家意志

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Pixel diplomacy

像素外交

How Saudi Arabia became a video-game superpower

沙特阿拉伯如何成为游戏超级大国

Electronic Arts is part of a multi-billion-dollar bid to dominate gaming

斥资数十亿美元争夺游戏业主导权，电子艺界是其中一环

今秋，潜行刺杀类游戏系列《刺客信条》将迎来一个意想不到的更新。其法国开发商育碧最近宣布了一套以沙特阿拉伯为背景的新任务。此前今年早些时候有报道称，育碧已与沙特国有企业Savvy游戏集团建立了合作伙伴关系。（育碧表示，沙特相关的游戏关卡正在"本地和国际组织"的帮助下制作。）玩家将能够潜行穿梭于欧拉古城——一个沙特政府正大力推广的旅游目的地历史名城。

沙特阿拉伯正斥资数十亿美元进军游戏产业，该行业如今的价值已超过电影、流媒体或音乐 。9月29日，这个王国迈出了迄今最大的一步：美国第三大游戏公司电子艺界宣布，其将被由沙特公共投资基金主导的财团以550亿美元收购。PIF是一个资产达1万亿美元的主权财富基金。这是一连串闪电式投资中的最新一例，这些投资正迅速将沙特阿拉伯变成视频游戏世界的超级大国。

在收购EA的交易中，沙特方面的合作伙伴包括私募股权公司银湖，以及由唐纳德·特朗普的女婿贾里德·库什纳创立的投资公司Affinity Partners。库什纳的加入可能有助于该交易获得监管批准。EA的新所有者将控制包括《麦登橄榄球》、《模拟人生》和《FC》（原名《FIFA》）在内的系列游戏。据称，足球系列游戏是沙特王储兼实际统治者穆罕默德·本·萨勒曼的最爱之一。

EA将成为一系列已熠熠生辉的资产中的皇冠明珠。PIF已通过其子公司Savvy游戏集团积累了庞大的游戏投资组合。该集团由王储担任主席的米斯克基金会孵化而成。2022年，Savvy以约10亿美元收购了瑞典公司Embracer Group的股份，该公司拥有《古墓丽影》等游戏的特许经营权。同年，Savvy以近50亿美元收购了美国游戏发行商动视暴雪、EA和Take-Two的大量股份。（微软收购动视暴雪后，Savvy出售了其股份。）Savvy还拥有日本开发商SNK 96%的股份，SNK是《拳皇》等格斗游戏的制作方。

Brian Ward是Savvy的CEO，他曾在动视和亚马逊游戏工作室工作。他表示，该公司的战略有三个支柱。首先，像收购EA这样，收购一家大型游戏发行商。其次，收购一家或多家大型电子竞技公司（Savvy已经拥有竞技游戏比赛平台FaceIt和电子竞技组织ESL）。第三，在沙特国内培育游戏开发产业。

其电子竞技部门尚未盈利。但其目的是为了激发玩家的参与度——在这方面似乎正在取得成功。过去两年，沙特阿拉伯一直在利雅得举办电子竞技世界杯，参赛队伍在《英雄联盟》等游戏中展开竞争（穆罕默德王储会在一些职业选手来访时与他们切磋）。今年夏天的赛事售出了约25万张门票；在Twitch和抖音等平台上，其 线上流媒体播放量达到了7.5亿次，其中半数观众来自中国 。行业巨头们纷纷飞抵参加同期举行的会议，一位西方投资者表示，这已成为游戏行业最重要的会议。明年，利雅得将启动另一项赛事——两年一度的电子竞技国家杯。

除了满足王储的个人爱好之外，所有这些举措的理由是为了创建一个新的国内产业。 沙特阿拉伯正试图实现经济多元化，减少对石油的依赖 。其"2030愿景"计划承诺到那一年在游戏领域创造3.9万个就业岗位。Savvy正在努拉公主大学（一所女子学院）培训游戏美术师。沙特政府表示，该国48%的游戏玩家是女性；Savvy的员工中略超过四分之一是女性，这个数字与男性主导的行业标准大致相当。

Savvy的员工中略超过三分之一是外国人，沃德预计这一比例将随着行业的成熟而下降。组织电子竞技世界杯的德国人拉尔夫·赖歇特表示，随着更多人亲自了解这个国家，说服西方人投资或在沙特工作正变得更容易："你永远无法满足所有批评者，但围绕它的噪音已经大大减少了。"

这暗示了另一个动机。与沙特在体育和娱乐领域的投资（最近推出了电影节、喜剧节和一级方程式大奖赛）一样，其对游戏业的推动有助于塑造该国不同的形象。

许多游戏玩家想知道沙特的所有权将如何影响游戏内容。随着中国成为一个重要的电影市场，好莱坞制片公司已回避诸如西藏之类的敏感题材，而这些题材在1990年代他们是愿意触及的。很容易想象类似的情况会在游戏行业发生。1992年，海湾战争结束后，EA发布了《沙漠风暴》，其中的反派是一个虚构的阿拉伯独裁者。2005年，在反恐战争期间，EA的《战地2》让美国军队与包括"中东联盟"在内的敌人对抗。这类游戏在EA的新所有者手下还会发布吗？公司老板安德鲁·威尔逊已向员工保证，优先考虑的仍然是"大胆、富有表现力"的作品，公司的"价值观……保持不变"。

支线任务

然而，《刺客信条》即将到来的更新显示了沙特的资金可能如何微妙地影响内容。这不是唯一的例子。今年三月，《饿狼传说》的粉丝们惊讶地得知，这款格斗游戏的最新版本将包含一个新角色：克里斯蒂亚诺·罗纳尔多。在游戏中，这位葡萄牙足球运动员用一个火球猛击对手，并且是"即使对经验丰富的战士来说也是不可阻挡的力量"。

这次不寻常的合作可能有沙特方面的原因。罗纳尔多是总部设在利雅得的阿尔纳斯尔足球俱乐部的队长，该俱乐部由PIF持有多数股权。《饿狼传说》的日本开发商SNK则由沙特非营利组织米斯克基金会持有多数股权——该基金会的创始人兼主席正是那位热爱游戏的王储。■

“Assassin’s Creed”, a sneak-up-and-kill gaming franchise, is getting an unexpected update this autumn. Ubisoft, its French developer, recently announced a new set of missions set in Saudi Arabia (see picture below). The news followed reports earlier this year that Ubisoft had entered a partnership with Savvy Games Group, a Saudi state-owned enterprise. (Ubisoft says that the Saudi levels are being made with help from “local and international organisations”.) Players will be able to tiptoe around Al Ula, a historic city that the Saudi government is promoting as a tourist destination

Saudi Arabia is making a multi-billion-dollar push into gaming, an industry that is now worth more than cinema, streamingor music. On September 29th the kingdom made its biggest move yet, when Electronic Arts (EA), America’s third-largest gaming company, announced that it was being bought for $55bn by a group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), a $1trn sovereign-wealth kitty. It is the latest in a blitz of investment that is quickly turning Saudi Arabia into a superpower in the world of video games

The Saudis’ partners in the EAacquisitionare Silver Lake, a private-equity firm, and Affinity Partners, an investment company founded by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose attachment to the deal may smooth the path to regulatory approval. EA’s new owners will control franchises including “Madden”, “The Sims” and “FC” (formerly known as “FIFA”), a football series that is said to be a favourite of Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler.

EAwill be the crown jewel in an already glittering set of holdings. The PIFPixel diplomacy

How Saudi Arabia became a video-game superpower

Electronic Arts is part of a multi-billion-dollar bid to dominate gaming

Oct 09, 2025 05:09 AM

EAwill be the crown jewel in an already glittering set of holdings. The PIFIts e-sports arm is not yet profitable. But its purpose is to stoke fans’ engagement—and there it seems to be succeeding. For the past two years Saudi Arabia has hosted an Esports World Cup in Riyadh, where teams compete in games such as “League of Legends” (Prince Muhammad plays some of the pros when they are over). Some 250,000 tickets were sold for this summer’s event; online it racked up 750m streams on platforms such as Twitch and Douyin, with half the audience watching from China. Industry bigwigs fly in for a parallel conference, which has become the most important in the gaming business, according to one Western investor. Next year Riyadh will launch another tournament, a biennial Esports Nations Cup.

The justification for all this, besides indulging the crown prince’s hobby, is to create a new domestic industry. Saudi Arabia is trying to diversify its economy away from oil. Its “Vision 2030” initiative promises 39,000 jobs in gaming by that year. Savvy is training game artists at Princess Nourah University, a women’s college. The Saudi government says that 48% of the country’s gamers are women; just over a quarter of Savvy’s staff are female, a number roughly in line with the male-dominated industry standard.

A little over a third of Savvy’s employees are foreigners, a share which Mr Ward expects to fall as the industry matures. Persuading Westerners to invest or work in the kingdom is getting easier as more people see the country for themselves, says Ralf Reichert, a German who organises the Esports World Cup: “You will never be able to satisfy all the critics, but the noise around it has dramatically gone down.”

That hints at another motive. Like Saudi Arabia’s investment in sport and entertainment (it has recently launched film and comedy festivals and a Formula One grand prix), its push into gaming helps to project a different image of the country.

“There’s five to ten thousand years of human history in the Middle East, but none of those stories have been told in our medium. And that’s a huge opportunity,” says Mr Ward. The Arabic-speaking world—with 330m gamers, more than western Europe or America—is underserved, he believes, citing Japan, China and South Korea as models of how to adapt national folklore into popular games. Last year China’s “Black Myth: Wukong”, a game steeped in Chinese legends, was voted Game of the Year by users of Steam, a global gaming platform. Mr Ward says that projecting Saudi culture is not part of his mandate. But he hopes that future Saudi-made games will have worldwide appeal, just as east Asian titles have.

Many gamers wonder how Saudi ownership will influence games’ content. As China has become an important movie market, Hollywood studios have shied away from tricky subjects such as Tibet, which they were willing to take on in the 1990s. It is easy to imagine something similar happening in gaming. In 1992, in the aftermath of the Gulf war, EAreleased “Desert Strike”, whose villain is a fictional Arab dictator. In 2005, amid the war on terror, EA’s “Battlefield 2” pitted American forces against enemies including a “Middle Eastern Coalition”. Will such games be released under EA’s new owners? The company’s boss, Andrew Wilson, has assured staff that the priority is still “bold, expressive” fare and that the company’s “values…remain unchanged”.

The side quest

Yet the coming update to “Assassin’s Creed” shows how Saudi money might subtly sway content. It is not the only example. In March fans of “Fatal Fury” were surprised to learn that the latest edition of the fighting game would include a new character: Cristiano Ronaldo. In the game the Portuguese footballer whacks opponents with a fiery ball and is “an unstoppable force, even to seasoned fighters”.

The unusual collaboration may have a Saudi explanation. Mr Ronaldo is the captain of Al Nassr FC, a team based in Riyadh, which is majority-owned by the PIF. The Japanese developer of “Fatal Fury”, SNK, is majority-owned by the MiSKFoundation, a Saudi non-profit organisation—whose founder and chairman is a certain games-loving crown prince. ■

来源：左右图史