ESL, FACEIT acquired and merged by Saudi-owned Savvy Gaming Group for reported $1.5 billion

The Present day Occasions Group has officially marketed its esports event organizer ESL to the Savvy Gaming Group. The organization has also picked up FACEIT, which usually means that two of the largest tournament organizers in esports will be transforming hands—and merging—for a documented $1.5 billion, in accordance to the Sports activities Business Journal. The Savvy Gaming Team is “fully owned” by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, in accordance to ESL and FACEIT’s announcement.
ESL is famed for web hosting gatherings like ESL One, Intel Serious Masters, the ESL Pro Tour, and ESL Engage in, and can be discovered throughout several globally-acclaimed esports these kinds of as CS:GO, StarCraft, and Dota 2. In a identical vein, FACEIT has grow to be a person of the major unbiased aggressive gaming platforms in the globe, most known for the Esports Championship Collection and hosting the 2018 London Major in CS:GO.
ESL and FACEIT’s leadership groups will continue to be fairly the similar. Craig Levine and Niccolo Maisto will be co-CEOs, even though ESL’s co-founder Ralf Reichert will move into an executive chairman purpose in aid of the leadership staff.
“By uniting these complementary capabilities, and with the backing of SGG, we are using a extended-time period technique to establish a additional sturdy platform to much better assist the upcoming of the whole competitive gaming ecosystem and deliver extra price for all its stakeholders in a sustainable way,” Maisto explained in the official announcement.
The Savvy Gaming Team is a prolonged-phrase investor group currently headed by Brian Ward, the former head of globally studios at Activision Blizzard. He’s also joined by Jerry Gamez and Kadri Harma. The former is the CEO of Savvy’s infrastructure enterprise, when the latter is the CEO of its ecosystem firm, according to the Sports activities Business enterprise Journal.
SGG suggests it’s comprised of 5 operating corporations: Savvy Esports Company, Savvy Fund, Savvy Ecosystem Business, Savvy Game titles Studio, and the Savvy Infrastructure Business. Each one is “committed to empowering and enabling the strategies” of its companions and is “investing closely in the video games and esports market.”