Saudi Arabia’s Gaming Boom Needs an IP Backbone — SAIP’s New Report Shows Why
The Kingdom’s video game sector is no longer a side conversation in the entertainment economy — it is fast becoming one of its main pillars. That is the underlying message of a newly published analytical document from the Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SAIP), titled “The Video Game Industry from an Intellectual Property Perspective,” which lays out both the scale of that growth and the legal architecture the industry will need to sustain it. The numbers justify the attention: globally, the games market generated an estimated $187.7 billion in 2024 and is expected to climb past $206 billion by 2028, while Saudi Arabia’s own market is growing even faster than the global average, from roughly $2.19 billion in 2024 to a projected $4.73 billion by 2033. SAIP’s data puts the number of gamers in the Kingdom at approximately 23.5 million — around 67 percent of internet users — making Saudi Arabia the largest gaming market in the Middle East and North Africa by both revenue and player base, a position the report ties directly to Vision 2030’s creative and digital diversification goals.
The report’s central argument is that a video game is not a single work but a bundle of overlapping intellectual property rights, and that treating it as anything less exposes developers, publishers, and investors to real commercial risk. Under Saudi copyright law, a game’s source code is treated as a literary work in its own right, protected automatically upon creation for at least 50 years — a protection that extends to its narrative, music, voice acting, and motion-capture performances as well. Interfaces and icons can separately qualify for industrial design protection, though only for their aesthetic dimension, not their function. Titles, logos, and distinctive in-game characters can be registered as trademarks under GCC law for ten renewable years, with franchises like Call of Duty cited as names that have become brand assets in their own right, spanning merchandising and film. Novel technical mechanisms, meanwhile, can be patented provided they meet the standard tests of novelty and inventive step, though abstract gameplay ideas cannot.
Where the report becomes most useful for an industry audience is its shift from what can be protected to how protection actually gets enforced — and it admits the gap is wide. Piracy and unauthorized copying remain rampant, worsened by peer-to-peer distribution, with global losses estimated in the billions annually and piracy rates in some developing markets exceeding 70 percent. Cross-border digital distribution lets infringing content reach players in any jurisdiction instantly, straining national courts built for territorial disputes. “Game cloning” — near-identical copies of successful titles released with only cosmetic changes — has been judged inconsistently across jurisdictions, since courts often struggle to distinguish “inspiration” from unauthorized copying. And infringement is frequently carried out through anonymous or offshore servers, making it hard for smaller studios in particular to prove damages or even identify a responsible party. The report names a fifth, less technical challenge underlying all of these: low public awareness, with many younger and casual players unaware that unofficial downloads or “cracked” copies constitute rights violations at all.
To illustrate how other jurisdictions are responding, the report surveys comparative practice: the EU’s “notice-and-staydown” approach under its 2019 Digital Single Market directive, Japan’s 2020 expansion of criminal liability to cover unauthorized downloading and “leech sites,” the US DMCA’s notice-and-takedown mechanism, the WIPO ALERT initiative for cutting off ad revenue to piracy sites, specialized units like London’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, and South Korean court rulings that have found game cloning liable even where no line of code was directly copied.
None of this is presented as abstract comparative law. The report frames it as a roadmap: Saudi Arabia already has the underlying legal building blocks — copyright protection, the GCC trademark framework, an industrial design regime, and a patent system — but the enforcement infrastructure that makes those rights meaningful in a fast-moving digital market is still catching up to the sector’s growth. For a market projected to more than double by 2033, closing that gap is not a legal footnote; it is a precondition for the kind of sustained investment the Kingdom is trying to attract. For developers and studios operating in or entering the Saudi market, the practical takeaway is straightforward: intellectual property strategy needs to be built into a game’s development pipeline from day one, rather than treated as a legal afterthought once a title has already found an audience.
