Vietnam has emerged as a leading game producer in the world with many local enterprises having developed, issued, and traded online games instead of purchasing them from other countries.

Google late last month held an event called ‘Google Think Apps 2023 – Build the Future,' in Ho Chi Minh City. This was considered the largest event held by Google in Southeast Asia over the past decade, proving the position of Vietnam in the development of apps, especially games.

Vietnam jumped to the world’s top five countries with 4.2 billion downloads of apps made by domestic developers in the first quarter of this year from the 15th position in 2019, said a Google representative, citing a report by DataAI & AppMagic, released by DataAI, a U.S.-based firm combining consumer and market data in a single platform powered by AI, and APPMagic, a powerful mobile market intelligence tool, also based in the U.S..  

Four app developers in Vietnam were among the top 50 enterprises whose apps have been downloaded over 100,000 times in 2022, including Falcon Global, ABI Global, Zego Global, and Rocket Studio.

Vietnam has become as a center for leading developers who will enhance its status as a power in app development, the Google representative added.

The report also showed that 93 Vietnamese game and app developers own 171 apps which were at least once in the weekly list of 10 most-downloaded apps on the Play Store.

Bloomberg recently assessed Vietnam as a gaming powerhouse. The country is among the top five countries in the world for mobile game production, based on downloads in the first half of 2023. 

Many Vietnamese studios have ventured into the international market and achieved success.

VNG Corporation, which is known as the first tech unicorn in Vietnam, has boasted 261 million downloads of its MPS studio’s games since 2019, mainly by gamers from South Asia, South America, and Southeast Asia, a VNG representative said.

Dead Target is one of the most successful games of MPS with downloads totaling 155 million.

In 2022, VNG launched Gunny Origin, which ranked second in terms of downloads in advance from the app store for the iOS operating system in Taiwan and fifth in Hong Kong at launch.

Amanotes, a Vietnamese music game developer, made a name for itself with games Magic Tiles 3 and Tiles Hop. It is among the leading music game developers in the world.

Amanotes’ products have reached users in over 190 countries and territories with a total of over 2.9 billion downloads.

With an ambition to lead the global market in music games, the enterprise has been conducting strategic cooperation and merger plans.

“Through the close relations with global partners, such as Google, AWS, and ironSource, the company has increasingly improved its strengths in attracting users and optimizing revenue with its system of more than 100 million users per month,” said Tuan Binh, CEO of Amanotes.

Similarly, Topebox, a game studio in Ho Chi Minh City, has over 80 game products traded in the global market.

Its Pocket Army product introduced in 2012 became the first Vietnamese-produced game in the list of apps with the highest revenue in the U.S..

Topebox launched Titan Hunters in 2022 and saw some 500,000 downloads of the game after six months. The game was also among the three most favorite in Japan.

Thai Thanh Liem, CEO of Topebox game studio, said Vietnam tends to rapidly keep pace with global technology.

He cited two examples of ‘Flappy Bird,’ which opened up an era of mobile games, and ‘Axie Infinity,’ which initiated the blockchain-based game model.

Vietnam has many excellent talents working for tech giants, such as Google, META, and Microsoft, said Nguyen Truong Minh, director of GOSU Online Corporation’s GBC Center, adding that the strong development of the gaming sector has created an ideal environment for these engineers.

Domestic game enterprises have carried out plans to develop the gaming workforce. For example, VNG has cooperated with large universities, such as Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, and Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City.

Challenges remain

Many local game producers admitted that they are not on a par with foreign rivals in both product scale and quality.

Nguyen Dinh Khanh, founder and CEO of Wolffun Game, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that Vietnamese games were among the most downloaded in the world, but they remained far behind leading firms in terms of the complexity, quality, and graphics of the games.

Vietnam has not been able to create games which can earn billions of U.S. dollars in revenue, Khanh added.

Kelly Wong, deputy general director of online games at VNG, shared the same viewpoint, saying, “We are inexperienced in developing complicated games, such as role-playing games.”

The development of games takes higher risks than film production, for example, due to high costs and long production time, according to Wong.

“We are focusing on popular games with simple play scenarios,” Wong noted.

Many experts in the gaming industry said that the government has yet to issue preferential policies for game production and equate game development with game publishing.

At the Vietnam Game Festival 2023 in April, Le Quang Tu Do, head of the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information under the Ministry of Information and Communications, said, “Our biggest problem is failure in cooperation.”

Over the past 10 years, game enterprises and studios have chosen to go alone to go fast, so just some of them have got success. As they have not joined hands, they have encountered multiple difficulties and failed to take advantage of each other’s strengths. 

Good game developers are inexperienced in publishing, so they cannot access a large number of users, while good publishers have found it hard to seek high-quality Vietnamese games.

As a result, most Vietnamese gamers play foreign games, and Vietnamese game producers mainly serve foreign customers, the official analyzed.

The Ministry of Information and Communications has set up an alliance to boost the gaming industry and called on foreign investment funds and enterprises to invest in Vietnam.

Many enterprises from China, South Korea, and the U.S. will come to Vietnam to seek cooperation opportunities, Do stated.

Vietnam set targets for the gaming sector to increase revenue to US$1 billion and the number of gaming enterprises to 100, even 150 from the current 30, as well as attract 400 start-ups to foray into the sector.

“We are working closely with ministries and agencies to give a priority to the gaming industry development, firstly eliminating unreasonable taxes and fees and piloting support policies," Do said.

“The ministry is drawing up a draft decree on game management, including a proposal to get rid of complicated licenses and administrative procedures.”

Nguyen Dinh Khanh from Wolffun Game said it is needed to develop the gaming industry’s scale and quality. 

Game design, data analysis, and programming should be included in curriculums at schools like in developed countries, such as Finland, Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and China.

Khanh called on the community to have a fair insight into the gaming industry.

He also hoped for a higher investment in human resources. At present, the sector is lacking in professional training schools and centers.

Vietnam ranked third in Southeast Asia in the number of mobile gamers in 2022, at 54.6 million, but the gaming industry’s revenue was modest, at $507 million, according to the Global Games Market Report 2022 of video game and gamer data company Newzoo.

Meanwhile, Thailand had 38.3 million gamers but its gaming revenue ranked second in the region with $763 million.

By 2025, Vietnam’s gaming revenue will be still well below that of Thailand and account for a small proportion of the region’s total gaming turnover.

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