Vietnamese gaming industry, billions of users, ambition to lead the world

If in the past Vietnam mainly bought foreign games to publish and sell, recently many businesses have emerged very strongly, from the stages of game development, publishing and trading.

Game character artist working at VNG Company in Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City - Photo: DUC THIEN

At the end of July, Google held an event called Google Think Apps 2023 - Building the Future in Ho Chi Minh City. The event, considered by many in the industry to be Google's biggest event in Southeast Asia in the past 10 years, shows a new position for the application development industry, especially games , in Vietnam.

"Vietnam is a game development powerhouse"

At the Think Apps 2023 event, citing a report by DataAI & AppMagic, a Google representative said: from 2019 to the first quarter of 2023, Vietnam jumped from the top 15 to the top 5 globally in terms of app downloads, equivalent to 4.2 billion downloads.

According to the report, four Vietnamese app developers are among the top 50 global companies with new apps surpassing 100,000 downloads in 2022: Falcon Global, ABI Global, Zego Global and Rocket Studio.

"Vietnam has emerged as a hub for leading developers, cementing its reputation as a powerhouse in the app development industry," said a Google representative.

Recently, the famous news agency Bloomberg also evaluated Vietnam as a gaming powerhouse . Bloomberg cited data showing that Vietnam is in the top 5 countries producing mobile games in the world, based on downloads in the first six months of 2023.

Billions of users, ambition to lead

Many businesses and game studios in Vietnam have boldly "reached out to the ocean" and succeeded, such as VNG - Vietnam's first technology unicorn.

According to a VNG representative, the total number of downloads of MPS studio's (VNG's) game products from 2019 to present is 261 million, mostly from countries in South Asia, South America and Southeast Asia. Of which, Dead Target is one of MPS's most successful games with a total of 155 million downloads, mainly in Asia and North America.

In fiscal year 2022, VNG launched the game Gunny Origin, reaching the top 2 in total pre-orders on the iOS app store in Taiwan and the top 5 in Hong Kong at the time of launch.

Amanotes, a music game developer, has also made its mark with popular music titles such as Magic Tiles 3 and Tiles Hop, and is among the world’s top music game publishers. Amanotes’ products have reached users in over 190 countries, with a total of over 2.9 billion downloads.

With the ambition to lead the global market in music games, this enterprise has been implementing merger and strategic cooperation projects to quickly gain special capabilities in the market.

"Through close relationships with global partners such as Google, AWS, ironSource..., the company is increasingly enhancing its strength in attracting users and optimizing revenue with a data system of more than 100 million monthly users" - Mr. Tuan Binh, CEO of Amanotes, shared the methods and significance of the cooperation/M&A strategy that the company is implementing.

Or start-up named Topebox, a game development studio in Ho Chi Minh City, also has more than 80 game products on the global market.

Among them, Pocket Army, launched in 2012, became the first Vietnamese game to enter the top grossing apps in the US. In 2022, Titan Hunters was launched, reaching more than 500,000 downloads after six months, making it one of the top 3 most popular games in Japan.

A team working at Topebox in a comfortable, home-like style - Photo: DUC THIEN

Many challenges remain

Despite being recognized by the world, many game production leaders admit that they are still "far behind in quality and scale" compared to the world. Sharing with Tuoi Tre, Mr. Nguyen Dinh Khanh - founder and CEO of Wolffun Game - frankly said: "Just considering mobile games and downloads, Vietnam is in the group with the most downloaded games in the world.

However, if we compare the quality on a product scale with criteria including complexity, quality of game feel, graphics... then we are far from the world's leading group. We still have not appeared games with average difficulty that can be compared with games like Lien Quan, Free Fire... let alone compared with higher level games".

Regarding revenue, Mr. Khanh said that Vietnam cannot produce games with revenue of billions of USD/year. "If talking about games on PC (computer) or Console (game console), Vietnamese businesses are almost incomparable," Mr. Khanh commented.

Similarly, Mr. Kelly Wong - Deputy General Director of VNG online games - also said: "We do not have much experience developing complex games like RPG (role-playing game)...".

According to Mr. Wong, developing a game is very risky, even riskier than producing a movie due to budget, production time... "We are still focusing on making popular games with simple gameplay scenarios...", Mr. Wong said.

In addition, many experts in the field also believe that the Government's lack of investment policies focusing on the game production industry, and the equating of game development and game publishing - that is, buying foreign games to operate domestically - also creates many difficulties.

At the Vietnam Game Festival 2023 held in April 2023, Mr. Le Quang Tu Do, Director of the Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information of the Ministry of Information and Communications, said that he had set a goal for the game industry to quickly increase revenue to 1 billion USD, increase the number of game businesses from the current 30 to 100 or even 150, and attract 400 production start-ups to join the community.

"We are working closely with ministries to prioritize the development of the gaming industry. First is to remove unreasonable taxes, second is to have pilot support policies such as Sandbox. The ministry is also drafting a new decree on gaming management to submit to the Government, in which it recommends removing cumbersome licenses and administrative procedures," said Mr. Tu Do.

Meanwhile, Mr. Nguyen Dinh Khanh - founder and CEO of Wolffun Game - also said that the State needs to soon have more tax incentives and start-up capital incentives for the game industry. This is something that game production studios have long been hoping for, but there have not been many positive changes.

Students from many universities in Ho Chi Minh City visited and listened to the sharing from team leaders at Wolffun - Photo: THANH TRUC

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