Gamers8 Festival & Esports World Cup (Riyadh)
Saudi Arabia
2022 – Present (Vision 2030 Expansion)
The Mechanism
In 2022, Saudi Arabia launched a strategic takeover of the global e-sports industry, investing over $38 billion through its Public Investment Fund (PIF) to purchase stakes in major gaming publishers (including SNK, Capcom and Nintendo) and to host the world's richest gaming tournaments. The centrepiece of this strategy is the Esports World Cup, which offered a $60 million prize pool in 2024, the largest in gaming history.
This is a calculated effort to rebrand the Kingdom for a generation raised on digital media rather than traditional news outlets. As Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stated in 2023: "Gaming and e-sports are the new oil."
Documented Evidence of Abuse
Their Freedom studied tracings of how the e-sports strategy directly contradicts the values of the gaming community:
While hosting tournaments celebrating "online freedom and creativity," the Saudi state sentenced fitness trainer Manahel al-Otaibi to 11 years in prison in January 2024 for posting social media content advocating for women's rights. She was convicted under the same cybercrime laws that the government uses to monitor gaming platforms.
In 2023, the Kingdom executed over 300 people, including individuals convicted of crimes related to online speech. Activist Mohammad al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death for posts made on X (formerly Twitter). Yet during the Esports World Cup, Saudi officials hosted panels on "inclusive digital spaces."
While Western e-sports players wore Pride flags during the tournament to protest Saudi laws criminalizing same-sex relationships, Saudi authorities banned spectators from displaying such symbols. The gaming community, which has long championed inclusivity, was forced to watch as its values were sanitized for state propaganda.
Major gaming companies, including Riot Games, Activision Blizzard and Epic Games, accepted Saudi sponsorship deals despite public outcry from their own player bases. Some prominent streamers boycotted the Esports World Cup, but the majority participated, prioritizing prize money over principle.
Dana Ahmed of Amnesty International stated: "Saudi Arabia is pouring billions into e-sports, a sector that thrives on online engagement, while simultaneously cracking down on any form of dissenting online expression with severe penalties, including death sentences."
The Esports World Cup presents itself as a celebration of gaming culture while, in reality, hijacking that very culture for state branding and control. By purchasing the infrastructure of the industry and offering financial incentives too large to refuse, Saudi Arabia has turned the digital frontier, once a space of relative freedom, into another venue for authoritarian branding. The gamers who built this community now find themselves competing in a state that would imprison them for the very tweets they post to promote their streams.