Ash Games raises 1.5 million dollars to build Saudi game IP

There is a particular kind of startup story that Saudi Arabia has been trying hard to produce, and Ash Games is close to being the model case. The Riyadh based studio has raised a 1.5 million dollar seed round co-led by Merak Capital and Impact46, invested through the Merak Gaming Fund, and while the sum is small by the standards of the funding wraps, what it is funding is unusual. This is not another publishing deal or a bet on distributing someone else's game. It is capital going into original Saudi intellectual property, a studio building games out of Arabian folklore and everyday Saudi life and aiming them squarely at a global audience. The studio itself has a clear identity, which is often the hardest thing for a young developer to establish. Ash Games was founded in 2022 by Anas Bakhsh, Yaser Alahmadi and Saud Bakolka, and it runs as a remote-first team of around 18 to 20 people making action-adventure titles for PC and console rather than the mobile and hyper-casual games that dominate much of the region's output. Its flagship is Nomad, fully titled Nomad: The Legend of Zarqa, a top-down action rogue lite drawn from the pre-Islamic legend of Zarqa al-Yamama, a figure from Arabian myth said to have foreseen danger from a great distance. The game carries a signature mechanic that lets players steer arrows in mid-flight through terrain and enemies, and it is targeting a release window in early 2027 across PC, PlayStation and Xbox, with a Steam wish list page already live. The studio is better known so far for Azooma Escape, a comedic stealth game rooted in ordinary Saudi life that launched in August 2025, and it has said it is exploring a mobile version provided the gameplay survives the move to touch controls. The through line across both titles is that they are built from stories the team grew up hearing but never got to play, which is a genuine creative premise rather than a marketing line. The money will do what seed money does for a studio, funding continued development on Nomad, expanding the team, and strengthening the international publishing and commercialization side that turns a finished game into actual revenue. What makes the round more interesting than its size is the backing that came before it. Ash Games had already received support from a striking list of Saudi state linked institutions, including NEOM, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the small business authority Monsha'at, and the Human Resources Development Fund, before Merak and Impact46 wrote the seed cheque alongside the Nomad trailer release. That layering of public support followed by private venture capital is exactly the pipeline Saudi Arabia has been trying to engineer, where government programs de-risk a studio early and commercial investors then step in to scale it. The regional context explains why so much institutional weight is landing behind an 18-person studio. Gaming is not a side project for Saudi Arabia but a formal pillar of Vision 2030, and the numbers behind that ambition are large. The Kingdom counts around 23.5 million gamers, roughly two-thirds of its population, and its National Gaming and E-sports Strategy targets a contribution of about 50 billion riyals, some 13 billion dollars, to GDP by 2030. Much of the money spent so far has gone into the visible end of the industry, the Savvy Games Group acquisitions, the e-sports tournaments, the stakes in foreign publishers. What Ash Games represents is the harder and less glamorous other half of that strategy, building homegrown creative capacity and original IP rather than buying it. Supporting infrastructure has grown alongside, with NEOM's Level Up Accelerator backing more than 45 Saudi gaming startups since 2023, and a widening set of local gaming focused funds now active. The honest caveat is that original premium games are among the riskiest bets in entertainment, where development runs long, budgets overrun, and even polished titles can vanish without a commercial trace, and 1.5 million dollars is a modest budget against the cost of shipping a console game that can stand next to established independent studios worldwide. Regional investors backing cultural storytelling over safer publishing plays is a meaningful vote of confidence, but the real test arrives in 2027 when Nomad actually reaches players and the market decides whether Saudi-rooted stories can travel. If it lands, Ash Games becomes proof that the Kingdom can export culture through games rather than simply consume and finance them, which is the more ambitious version of what Vision 2030 set out to do.