Gaming Industry Revenue Leads Global Creative Economy Platforms

Within the framework of the Vietnam GameVerse 2025 event, on May 26, the Vietnam Game Forum was held in Ho Chi Minh City. Sharing at the forum, Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Bao, General Director of VTC Corporation, said that the gaming industry's revenue is leading the global creative economic platforms with 188 billion USD in 2024, while music and movies combined are only 1/3, reaching about 60 billion USD.

VTC General Director Nguyen Ngoc Bao said that games are a digital bridge connecting and preserving Vietnamese culture. (Photo: Manh Hung)

Games are considered the best platform for spreading and empathizing with culture - a space for players to "live". The elements that make up this form of entertainment are images, sounds and most importantly, interaction. Every element must be vivid and give players initiative.

Taking examples from successful international games, the representative of publisher VTC brought the stories of 3 famous games from 3 countries: "Journey to the West" from China, "Pyramid Adventure" from Egypt and "Samurai Spirit" from Japan. The common point of these games is that they leave a strong cultural mark, when the whole world knows about famous characters and destinations, creating IP addresses that millions of gamers access. These are their cultural successes.

Vietnam can learn a lot from international experience when developing the gaming industry associated with promoting culture globally. (Photo: Manh Hung)

It is estimated that there are about 50 million gamers in Vietnam. Vietnam is also in the top 5 of Southeast Asia in terms of revenue from this industry. However, with a diverse culture, rich in identity, and deep history, this data warehouse has not been deeply exploited in digital and interactive form. National sports are also a potential source of data for developing esport game titles.

Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Bao emphasized: "We must create a national game IP, inspired by Vietnamese historical legends. This is the key point, if we cannot create Vietnamese cultural values on the map, it will be difficult for us to identify ourselves in the world."

Therefore, Vietnam needs to build a national strategy for Vietnamese cultural games, not chasing quantity but having direction and value. At the same time, these games need support funds to develop, especially for start-up studios, even individual developers, from partial support from the Government and the Game Alliance.

"Let's look at games as tools to preserve and convey culture, and give games the task of becoming a digital bridge between traditional values and the future," Mr. Bao added.

Young people with impressive cosplay costumes at Vietnam Gameverse 2025. (Photo: Manh Hung)

At the forum, international technology businesses also participated and provided many perspectives on the gaming industry at a time when artificial intelligence AI is strongly developing.

According to a Google Play representative, 73% of game studios are using AI in stages such as programming, creating new ideas, marketing, etc. Vietnamese game developers earned 2 trillion VND from this app store in 2024, with 5.7 billion downloads of apps and games. 490,000 direct and indirect jobs have been created from this publisher network ecosystem.

Vietnam is a leading country in developing games and applications on the Google store. (Photo: Manh Hung)

However, the gaming industry still faces difficulties: The retention rate of players of applications and games is still low, the traditional profit model is outdated. In 2024, Vietnamese applications and games will only earn 0.2 billion USD from digital purchases, ranking 18th globally despite being at the top in terms of downloads.

In the same vein, Meta believes AI is changing the gaming industry and creating connections. Over the past four years, the group has invested $100 billion in AI. AI applications are supporting product development, gathering player feedback, and creating effective outreach campaigns.

Mr. Le Quang Tu Do - Director of the Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information - said that in 2025, Vietnam Gameverse will see its scale expand to 100 participating units, double that of 2024, with the participation of many leading technology corporations and gaming companies in the world.