🔥 ByteDance just sold Mobile Legends: Bang Bang for $6 billion

Not because they needed the money. Because they wanted out of gaming.

Think about that for a second. The company that built TikTok, the most powerful content discovery machine ever created, 1.5 billion users, decided the games business wasn't worth keeping.

That decision matters more than the deal price.

Here's who bought it. Savvy Games Group, the gaming arm of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. You know them already if you've been paying attention.

2023: Scopely for $4.9 billion. 400 million registered players.
2025: Scopely buys Pokémon GO from Niantic, Inc. for $3.5 billion.
Also 2025: Electronic Arts (EA) agrees to be acquired by Saudi PIF for $55 billion. Taken private. 200 million accounts.
2026: MOONTON. 1.5 billion installs. 110 million monthly active users.

When you add those up, that's one sovereign wealth fund controlling the play time of nearly a billion people.

Now here's what I think almost every piece of coverage is getting wrong.

The Moonton deal isn't the story. EA going private is the story.

Public companies report ARPU, retention, session data, player spend. Quarterly. Under oath. Private companies report nothing.

When the entity that owns EA, Scopely, Pokémon GO and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang stops filing earnings, advertisers lose the only independent window they had into how mobile players actually behave.

UA managers have built entire acquisition strategies around that data but it won't exist anymore.

ByteDance saw gaming as a distribution problem. Savvy sees it as a data asset. One of them is right about what mobile gaming is actually worth and I don't think it's ByteDance.