ByteDance Nears $7B Sale of Mobile Legends Studio to Savvy Games

ByteDance is close to selling Moonton, the studio behind Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, to Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group for between $6 billion and $7 billion, according to a Reuters report published on February 13 citing two people familiar with the matter. One of the sources said the two sides have agreed on broad terms and could finalize the transaction as early as this quarter. 

The price would give ByteDance a sizable return on the roughly $4 billion it paid for Moonton in 2021, when its gaming arm Nuverse was still positioned as a serious challenger to Tencent and NetEase. That ambition collapsed two years later. In late 2023, ByteDance wound down Nuverse, cut about 1,000 jobs, and began looking for buyers for its remaining game assets, including Moonton. Talks with Savvy stalled that year over valuation disagreements, Bloomberg reported at the time, before resuming in the fall of 2025.

ByteDance's core business, meanwhile, has only grown stronger. Reuters previously reported the company's first- and second-quarter 2025 revenues exceeded those of Meta, and a recent employee share buyback pegged ByteDance's valuation above $330 billion. Selling Moonton would free up capital and management attention for the areas ByteDance now prioritizes: short-form video, e-commerce and generative AI.

DEAL SNAPSHOT

Price: $6-7 billion
Buyer: Savvy Games Group (Saudi PIF)
Seller: ByteDance
Asset: Moonton Technology (Mobile Legends studio)
Timeline: Could close Q1 2026

What Moonton's Mobile Legends sale means for Savvy Games Group

Moonton brings genuine scale. The studio employs more than 2,000 people across offices in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Latin America. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has crossed 1.5 billion installations, maintains more than 110 million monthly active users and ranks among the ten most-played games in over 80 countries, according to Moonton's website.

The game's competitive scene, though, may be its most valuable asset. In 2025, Mobile Legends ranked as the third most-watched esports title globally, behind only League of Legends and trailing it by a narrower margin than most PC-centric observers expected, according to data from Esports Charts. At the Esports World Cup in Riyadh last August, Mobile Legends peaked at 3.07 million concurrent viewers, more than doubling the second-highest title at the event. The M7 World Championship in January 2026 pushed the record further to 5.6 million peak concurrent viewers, the highest figure ever recorded for a mobile esports event.

That audience is overwhelmingly concentrated in Southeast Asia, where smartphone-first gaming audiences dwarf traditional PC and console markets. Indonesia alone regularly delivers peak viewership above 4 million for domestic league finals. That regional specificity could be a limitation or a strength, depending on how Savvy chooses to develop the property.

Savvy's Expanding Portfolio

For Savvy Games Group, which is wholly owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Moonton would be the latest in a string of acquisitions aimed at building a global gaming conglomerate:

• Scopely ($4.9 billion, 2023) - Mobile publisher that later acquired Niantic's games division including Pokemon Go for $3.5 billion
• ESL FACEIT Group - World's largest esports tournament operator
• EA consortium deal - PIF led group acquiring Electronic Arts for $55 billion (closing mid-2026, PIF will own ~93%)

Adding Moonton would give PIF's gaming ecosystem something it currently lacks: a dominant mobile esports franchise with deep roots in Asia's fastest-growing gaming markets. Combined with EA's sports simulation portfolio, Scopely's casual mobile games, ESL FACEIT's tournament infrastructure and minority stakes in Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive and several Japanese publishers, the Saudi fund's gaming footprint would span nearly every segment of the industry.

The deal still faces regulatory hurdles in both China and Saudi Arabia. An investigation published in November also raised questions about PIF's available cash for new investments, reporting that many of the fund's existing projects are in financial distress and managers have been encouraged to help bail out older holdings. PIF representatives characterized the situation as routine portfolio rebalancing. No gaming investments were listed among the troubled assets.

For ByteDance, a completed sale would close its most expensive chapter in gaming. It entered the space with billions to spend and ambitions to rival China's established publishers. It leaves with a profit on its biggest acquisition and a clearer focus on the businesses generating the bulk of its revenue.

None of the parties involved have confirmed the deal publicly. If it closes at the reported range, it would rank among the six largest gaming acquisitions in history.