Stephen Totilo
@stephentotilo.bsky.social
14K followers
620 following
1.2K posts
Reporter covering video games at Game File (gamefile.news). Previously launched games coverage at Axios and MTV News. Was Kotaku EiC. stephen(at)gamefile(dot)news he/him
Posts
Media
Videos
Starter Packs
Reposted by Stephen Totilo
![In September 2024, Savvy CEO Brian Ward was elected as one of the board of directors for The Embracer Group, the Swedish gaming conglomerate that owns the rights to Lord of the Rings and Tomb Raider franchises. Savvy is the second-largest shareholder of Embracer.
In May 2025, Savvy-owned Scopely completed its $3.5 billion purchase of most of the game portion of Niantic, including its popular mobile game Pokémon Go
Also in 2025, SNK’s newest fighting game, Fatal Fury: City of Wolves, had “one of the most aggressive [marketing campaigns] we’ve seen for a fighting game,” per Fighters Generation. City of Wolves’ promotional campaign included an unusually large $2.5 million tournament prize pool, the branding of one of the year’s biggest—and Saudi-backed—boxing matches as “Fatal Fury,” and multiple and a musical number in the middle of Wrestlemania 41, the biggest event of the year from Saudi government financial partner WWE. (Despite all that hype, poor sales led to the resignation of SNK’s CEO.)
In summer 2025, the eSports World Cup featured a spin-off New Global Sport Conference, which included a talk with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. During that talk, Guillemot confirmed a free-to-consumers mini-expansion to 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage. The add-on will be set in 9th century AlUla, which is located in what is now Saudi Arabia. (Ubisoft has declined to confirm that the Saudis are financing the 2025 expansion, but Game File sources familiar with the project are under the impression it is. A Ubisoft rep told me earlier this month that the game update “was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations…”)
Over the past several years, the Public Investment Fund has purchased large stakes of publicly traded gaming companies, holding 6.5% of EA rival and Grand Theft Auto maker Take Two, 6.6% of Capcom and 4.2% of Nintendo, among others](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:fs2pfwz4ohuc7nhlshklw55d/bafkreieluwfxrfitmqqzqbtpe4ougk6h63om3xctbwb5ndszhrjbuhcede@jpeg)
