Saudi Arabia's Esports World Cup Transforms Brands Into the Main Event
Saudi Arabia's Esports World Cup transformed brands from sponsors to main events. Mastercard, Aramco, and stc show how companies became essential to gaming.
For years, brands treated esports like a billboard. Put a logo on a livestream. Sponsor a tournament. Hope someone noticed.
The brands winning in esports today are not advertising alongside the action. They are the action.
Nowhere is this shift clearer than in Saudi Arabia, where the government has spent over US$38 billion through its Vision 2030 program to become the world's dominant esports destination.
The Esports World Cup Changed Everything
The Esports World Cup in Riyadh has become the biggest esports event on the planet by live attendance: three million on-site visitors over seven weeks in 2025, with 750 million total online viewers. That is Super Bowl-scale viewership, at a fraction of traditional sports sponsorship cost.
The prize pool alone illustrates the scale. At US$70 million, EWC 2025 offered the largest payout in esports history. That kind of money attracts the world's best players, the most prestigious tournaments, and the brands that want to reach a global, digitally native audience.
Amazon, Mastercard, Sony, PepsiCo, Spotify, and Crunchyroll all secured EWC 2025 partnerships. Fortune 500 companies are now treating an esports event as equivalent to a major traditional sports property.
Infrastructure as Identity
The most instructive case study is stc, Saudi Arabia's leading telecom.
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Instead of buying logo placement, stc deployed 27 advanced 5G towers, over 1,295 antennas, and AI-driven network management that delivered two gigabits per second of internet speed to the entire EWC venue. For eight consecutive years, stc has won the "Platinum Operator" award from Saudi Arabia's Communications, Space and Technology Commission.
Mohammed Al Nimer, Chief Commercial Officer of the Esports Foundation, described the approach: "For brands like stc, their role wasn't framed as sponsorship in the traditional sense. It was framed as performance and infrastructure."
Brands that become essential to the experience, rather than decorative to it, generate a fundamentally different kind of brand equity.
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From Sponsor to IP Owner
Aramco took this logic further. What started as the Aramco Sim Arena, a section of the EWC venue where fans could race in hyper-realistic Formula 1 simulators, has expanded into the Aramco Esports Championship: two seasons of weekly online sim racing, culminating in an in-person finale, plus Aramco Power Rankings tracking ongoing competitor standings.
A petrochemical company now owns an esports property. Its audience includes people who have never engaged with energy sector advertising.
Food and beverage brands have demonstrated the model works outside technology too. Al Baik sold over 500,000 EWC limited-edition Combo Meals across Saudi Arabia during the event, and distributed more than 100,000 ice creams on-site. Quantifiable sales lift from an esports activation is rare. Al Baik produced it by providing something genuinely useful rather than a campaign message.
APAC Context
Asia Pacific accounts for 57% of global esports viewership, roughly 365 million people. Southeast Asia alone has 290 million gamers, growing faster than North America or Europe. Nine out of 10 young people globally now game, and both Gen Z and Gen Alpha cite gaming as their primary social connection platform.
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Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2025 found that brand equity in esports is not driven by logo screen time. It is driven by perceived fit between brand values and gaming culture. Brands that build genuine experiences inside the ecosystem generate loyalty that passive logo placement cannot.
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