A Debut Title Three Years in the Making
MBC Game Studio broke cover at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, demoing 1001 Threads of Mizan, an action-adventure built around One Thousand and One Nights, with drop-in, drop-out co-op for up to three players and both ground and flying-carpet traversal. The studio has been working on it since 2023, with no release window announced yet.
"Remote working has been tremendously valuable in terms of being able to approach great people and say you can stay where you are," studio CEO Daniel Engelhardt told Game Developer at the show. "Our footprint includes folks in the Middle East with deep connections with the material." The team is led by Engelhardt and COO Trevor Williams and works fully remote.
Where Sovereign Money Found Its Talent
The studio has already hired veterans from BioWare, Hi-Rez Studios, Ubisoft Montreal and Bungie, four names that between them have shed thousands of jobs since 2022 as the wider games industry worked through its worst layoff cycle on record. MBC Game Studio's parent, MBC Studios, is a unit of MBC Group, the largest broadcaster in the Middle East and North Africa.
In 2025, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund acquired a 54 percent stake in MBC Group, buying the shares from Istedamah Holding Company, an investment vehicle run by the country's Ministry of Finance. PIF's broader dealmaking has already drawn scrutiny from industry figures and politicians; this studio is one of the smaller, quieter positions inside that portfolio, and it is hiring the exact profile of employee the rest of the industry has spent three years laying off.
The Layoff Wave MBC Is Hiring Into
The layoffs MBC is recruiting from are not a one-off. Tracking by industry outlets puts total games-industry job losses at roughly 45,000 between 2022 and mid-2025, with thousands more added in 2026 alone, including a single reported wave of 2,374 cuts in February.
| Year | Reported game-industry layoffs |
|---|---|
| 2022 | About 8,500 |
| 2023 | About 10,500 |
| 2024 | About 14,600 (worst year on record) |
| 2025 (through mid-year) | About 4,000 |
| 2026 (year to date) | At least 9,781 by late July, including 2,374 in February alone |
MBC has ruled out one obvious way to cut costs against that backdrop. "It's not that we're categorically against AI, it's just that as a studio we have a really strong belief that AI is only as strong as the person using it," Engelhardt told Game Developer, confirming a current policy against using generative AI in production.
The Decision Beyond One Studio
The usual assumption about state-backed entrants with deep pockets is that they use cheap capital to automate first and hire second, undercutting existing studios on cost. MBC Game Studio is doing close to the opposite: absorbing veteran talent the rest of the industry cut loose, at a moment when roughly one in three surveyed developers reports being personally affected by layoffs, while explicitly ruling out the one technology that could have let it do more with fewer of them.
That makes sovereign wealth a genuine labor-market clearing mechanism for game development, not just a financing line on a cap table. Where the displaced talent from a three-year layoff cycle actually lands, remote-first, state-backed, and building rather than automating, says as much about the industry's near-term shape as any single studio's launch title does.
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