Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is considering a potential combination of Electronic Arts and Savvy Games Group, Bloomberg reported, with Reuters confirming the report on September 10.

The most important word is potential. No final decision has been reached, and Reuters said EA and Savvy did not immediately respond to requests for comment while PIF declined to comment.

EA only just became a private company

The timing makes the report especially striking. On August 4, EA completed its approximately $55 billion acquisition by a consortium made up of PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners.

Shareholders received $210 in cash per share and EA stopped trading on Nasdaq. The publisher entered private ownership with a portfolio that includes EA Sports FC, Battlefield, Apex Legends, The Sims, Madden NFL and several other globally established series.

PIF was not a newcomer to EA before that transaction. It had held a minority position in the company for more than five years, and described entertainment and sports as strategic investment sectors when the acquisition closed.

Savvy brings a very different kind of scale

Savvy Games Group has spent the past several years assembling its own global gaming operation. Its most significant games business is Scopely, acquired for $4.9 billion in 2023.

Scopely's portfolio includes MONOPOLY GO!, Stumble Guys, Star Trek Fleet Command and WWE Champions. In 2025, it completed a $3.5 billion purchase of Niantic's games business, bringing Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now into the group.

Savvy also operates across esports through ESL FACEIT Group and development through Steer Studios. Combining it with EA would therefore connect major console and PC publishing with one of the industry's largest mobile operations.

There is another acquisition to finish first

Bloomberg's report says a merger is unlikely to move forward before Savvy completes its roughly $6 billion acquisition of Chinese mobile developer Moonton.

That makes this less an imminent announcement than a possible next stage in PIF's gaming structure. Savvy is still digesting one major deal while another configuration is being considered above it.

The industrial logic is obvious enough

EA offers sports franchises, large-scale console and PC development, live services and a huge global publishing network. Savvy's strongest operating asset, Scopely, brings deep mobile expertise and several extraordinarily durable free-to-play businesses.

Putting those capabilities together could create opportunities across technology, publishing and cross-platform expansion. It could also create overlapping corporate functions, which is where the usual merger language about efficiency becomes considerably less abstract for employees.

Reuters notes that the wider games industry is still dealing with cost reductions and layoffs after the pandemic-era expansion. There have been no announced job cuts tied to this possible EA-Savvy combination because there is not yet an announced transaction.

Regulators would have plenty to examine

Reuters also notes that a combination of this size could attract antitrust scrutiny. Major gaming acquisitions have faced increasingly detailed regulatory reviews in recent years, most visibly during Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard.

The structure here would be unusual because EA and Savvy already sit within PIF's broader investment orbit. Any eventual review would depend on the actual legal structure, governance and ownership of a transaction that has not yet been defined publicly.

The potential catalog is enormous

If PIF ultimately chose to combine the businesses, the resulting organization could place EA Sports FC, Battlefield, The Sims and Apex Legends alongside MONOPOLY GO!, Pokémon GO, Stumble Guys and Savvy's wider esports operations.

For now, that is a scenario being considered rather than a new corporate reality.

PIF has already helped take EA private and spent billions building Savvy's portfolio. The next question may be less about what else it wants to buy and more about how many separate gaming companies it wants to keep.