So that's the kind of people that we're working with, and that they are making millions and millions.

And yet still, there is this hunger for additional wealth that the Saudi government is extremely willing to prey on.

For these people, money is all the talks. And so it's working. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Nathan Grayson.

Nathan is a co-founder of Aftermath, a great video games and culture news website, and is the author of Stream Big, the triumphs and turmoils of Twitch and the stars behind the screen. Now, if you're a regular listener of the show, you might remember that Nathan was on the show rather recently, you know, a few months ago, where we talked about Microsoft and what has been happening with that company and its video games division in particular.

But after the recent acquisition or, you know, the planned acquisition of electronic arts, a major

video games publisher by Saudi Arabia's public investment fund and some other investors, I thought

we need to talk about

this because to me this seemed like a huge deal. Having Saudi Arabia through its public investment

fund, basically move in by this massive video games company, that's huge for culture, for the

video games industry itself. And a lot of people do play video games at the end of the

day. And seeing this reprehensible country's growing influence in video games, not to mention

many other forms of entertainment and culture, as we talk about in this episode, it's really

worrying to see that, right? You know, obviously Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil money.

It's trying to diversify its economy and its investments because it recognizes that at some

point, hopefully we would assume because of climate change, oil and gas is going to have to get

phased out and it's going to make a lot less money from that, that, you know, it's trying to

make sure that its money is in many different places. But it also has this terrible reputation to try to clean up, and entertainment and media is a great place to try to do that through, as we have successfully seen it doing now for a number of years. And this just seems like an extension of what has been going on there. But it also signals quite a bit about the video games industry itself, you know, where it

finds itself, what these companies are doing at this moment, and, you know, the difficulties

that they face moving forward, especially because of the business decisions that companies

like the electronic arts are making that are eroding the ability to churn out interesting new experiences

in favor of what is going to make the most money in the shortest amount of time. So basically

...