When MBC came home: the Saudi content turn

For 30 years, the most-watched Arabic-language television was produced from outside Saudi territory by a Saudi-owned company. The 2023 MBC relocation isn’t just a corporate logistics move — it’s the closing of that loop, and the visible signal that Saudi media production now happens at home.

The Saudi media-content story before Vision 2030 was structurally unusual: a country with the resources and audience to support a major regional content industry, but with its largest content producer operating from Dubai, its highest-end publishing running through London or Beirut bureaus, and no domestic film industry of consequence (cinemas had been closed since the 1980s). The 2017–2025 transformation didn’t just expand Saudi media; it relocated the production geography.

The MBC relocation

The single most-visible move was MBC Group’s April 2023 announcement that it was relocating its headquarters from Dubai Media City to Riyadh. MBC, founded in 1991 and Saudi-owned for most of its history, had operated from Dubai since 2002 — a period during which it grew into the largest free-to-air Arabic broadcaster in the world, with channels including MBC1, MBC2, MBC Action, Al Arabiya news, and the Shahid streaming service. The relocation moved several thousand jobs to Riyadh, began a multi-year campus build, and ended a structural anomaly: the regional center of Saudi-owned Arabic broadcasting had been built outside Saudi territory.

The Riyadh entertainment build-out was the carrot: by 2023, the talent pool, supplier ecosystem, and physical infrastructure for media production in Riyadh had reached the point where the relocation was operationally viable rather than just politically requested.

The film industry rebuild

The Saudi cinema reopening in April 2018 — the first commercial movie theater since the early 1980s — was the visible signal. The institutional buildout was slower and arguably more consequential. The Saudi Film Commission, established 2020, took over licensing, festival hosting, and production-support functions. The Red SeaThe Red Sea ProjectA luxury tourism development along the Red Sea coast, comprising over 90 islands and several hundred kilometers of coastline. Operated by Red Sea Global (a PIF subsidiary). The first hotels opened in 2023; the project's 2030 buildout targets ~50 hotels and a regional airport.→ Read more in the glossary International Film Festival, launched in Jeddah in 2021, has become the most internationally-attended Arab film festival, with the 2024 edition drawing a substantial roster of Arab and global filmmakers.

On the production side, Big Time Studios (a Saudi-Spanish JV), MBC Studios, Telfaz11 (an independent Saudi production house with a Netflix output deal), and several smaller companies built a domestic pipeline that produced over 100 Saudi-language feature films, series, and shorts between 2020 and 2025 — more than the cumulative output of the entire prior decade. The feature film “Norah,” made by Tawfik Alzaidi, became the first Saudi film selected for the Cannes Un Certain Regard section in 2024.

The gaming pivot

The gaming story is the most heavily-funded vertical of the Saudi content turn. Savvy Games GroupSavvy Games GroupThe PIF-owned gaming holding company, established 2022, with a SAR 142 billion ($38B) capital commitment to scale Saudi Arabia into a global gaming hub by 2030. Made the headline acquisition of ESL FACEIT Group for $1.5B in 2022, consolidating two of the world's largest esports operators. Operates Savvy Games Studios as the in-house game development arm and is the institutional backbone of the Esports World Cup hosted annually in Riyadh.→ Read more in the glossary, established in 2022 as a PIFPIF — Public Investment FundSaudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. Originally established in 1971 to hold state stakes in domestic industrial champions like SABIC, it was designated under Vision 2030 as the primary instrument for economic diversification. Assets grew from SAR 720B in 2017 to SAR 3.41T in 2025.→ Read more in the glossary-owned gaming holding company, came with a SAR 142 billion ($38 billion) capital commitment — at the time the largest single capital allocation any country had made to its gaming sector. The headline move was the 2022 acquisition of ESL FACEIT Group for $1.5 billion, consolidating two of the world’s largest esports tournament operators under Saudi ownership.

Downstream: Savvy Games Studios as an in-house development arm, and minority stakes in Nintendo (about 8% at peak), Capcom, Electronic Arts, and Activision-Blizzard. The Esports World Cup in Riyadh is the flagship Savvy-anchored event — the largest single-event prize pool in gaming by 2024–2025 ($60M+ across titles).

The Saudi gamer base is itself the underlying market. Roughly 70% of Saudi citizens identify as regular gamers; average daily play time is among the highest in the world; and gaming-related consumer spend per capita is consistently in the global top 10. The Savvy strategy isn’t only soft-power positioning — it’s tied to a real domestic consumer base.

The publishing and digital-content layer

The publishing side is led by SRMGSRMG — Saudi Research and Media GroupThe kingdom's largest publishing and digital-media group, founded 1972 and listed on the Tadawul. Owns flagship Arabic newspapers Asharq Al-Awsat and Al Eqtisadiah, English-language daily Arab News, the publishing house Hachette Antoine, and a roster of digital and broadcast assets. Has transitioned aggressively into digital products since 2020, including Tahaduth (a digital-content joint venture) and SRMG Plus (subscription platform).→ Read more in the glossary, the Saudi Research and Media Group, which owns Asharq Al-Awsat, Arab News, Al Eqtisadiah, and the Hachette Antoine publishing house among other assets. Its digital transformation since 2020 has included the SRMG Plus subscription platform, the Asharq Business with Bloomberg JV (launched 2022), and Tahaduth (a digital-content joint venture with the BBC and CNN among others). The TadawulTadawul — Saudi ExchangeThe kingdom's stock exchange. Hosts the Aramco IPO, the largest in history, and has become a key venue for Saudi small and mid-cap companies to raise growth capital.→ Read more in the glossary-listed SRMG share price has roughly doubled since 2020.

The podcast and audio-content sector has been an underpublicized growth area. Thmanyah Productions, founded 2016 and now PIF-backed, operates the most-downloaded Arabic-language podcast network. Saudi Arabia is among the top three countries globally by per-capita Arabic-podcast consumption.

What this means for citizens

Three concrete things. First, employment. The combined media and content sector now employs an estimated 50,000–70,000 Saudis directly — a category that essentially didn’t exist outside government broadcasting in 2017. Film production crews, gaming studio developers, podcast hosts, content moderators, digital marketers, broadcast journalists — these are real Saudi career paths now, where a decade ago the standard advice was “either work in government media or move to Dubai.”

Second, content access. Saudi citizens now consume substantially more Saudi-produced content than pre-2017. Shahid, the MBC-owned streaming service, has roughly 5 million paid Saudi subscribers; the Saudi-language original-production share has risen from negligible to roughly 40% of new commissioned content. Arabic content is no longer dominated by Egyptian and Levantine productions to the degree it was a decade ago.

Third, soft-power signaling. The international visibility of Saudi-produced film, Saudi gaming events, and Saudi-anchored business journalism is a different kind of national-image asset than the entertainment events and sports hosting covered in earlier articles. The content layer is where domestic production and international reception meet.