The average Saudi gamer princes steam profile: https://web.archive.org/web/20200313155350/https://steamcommunity.com/id/Archangel_Yuji/

“Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is a member of the Saudi royal family. He has been detained without explanation since January 2018 as part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s 2017–2019 Saudi Arabian purge.”

As we all know, throwing tons of money at esports has always worked so well in the past! /s

Stop buying oil

Not fucking likely lmao

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In soccer, the world’s most popular and lucrative sport, the kingdom has brought global superstars such as Karim Benzema, Neymar, and Jordan Henderson to the desert to play their trade, laboring not only under the region’s sweltering heat but virulent criticisms of sportswashing.

According to Savvy CEO Brian Ward, a former executive at EA and Activision, the country aims to become a gaming “powerhouse,” transforming the kingdom into a hub of development and esports and, in the process, perhaps making Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman the most powerful, avowed “gamer” in the entire world.

In this era of mergers and acquisitions, such gigantic investment is hardly remarkable, but “the appetite with which Savvy and PIF has sucked their teeth into this is unprecedented,” says Joost van Dreunen, a New York University professor who wrote a book about the business of video games.

This has led to the current bizarre moment: a nation state with an appalling human rights record, and which hands out the death sentence to those who tweet critically of it, forcing its way into what continues to be an often nerdish, escapist pursuit.

The country is in flux, which is why Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at Skema Business School in Paris, argues that investment in video games and other industries is fundamentally a matter of “security.”

Because of this gap in funding — money it appears Embracer had already been spending — hundreds of developers (and counting) lost their jobs, including those at the highly regarded, long-running studio Volition, maker of the Saints Row and Red Faction franchises.

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