Local game developers eye great opportunities at home

Illustrative image (Photo: Vietnamnet)

Hanoi – The bustling game market in Vietnam is offering numerous opportunities for developers, according to experts.

Le Quang Tu Do, Director of the Authority of Broadcasting, Television and Electronic Information under the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), cited data from App Annie 2020 showing that Vietnam ranked seventh in the world and second in Southeast Asia in the number of game downloads.

Meanwhile, the country also ranked third in the top 10 game application manufacturers in the region. For every 25 games downloaded, there is one produced in Vietnamese studios. According to the statistics of Sensor Tower and the Vietnam Game Studio Club, there are currently about 5,000 games produced by Vietnamese people, mostly for children, entertainment, and education.

Do said that the wage of each game developer in Vietnam is about 187 million VND (7,975 USD) per year, while that of each artist is abour 389 million VND (16,590 USD) annually, which is higher than the average income of Vietnamese people.

Currently, many training establishments have provided intense training programmes in game-related areas, meeting the demand for human resources of the domestic game market.

A report from domestic game enterprises showed that revenue of the sector reached over 7 trillion VND (298.47 million USD) in 2021, which was estimated at over 10 trillion VND in 2022.

According to experts, in 2021, Vietnam surged as the "capital" of applying blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a series of games produced and published by Vietnamese people.

Pham Van Thanh, Director of VTC Game, said that a young population with more than half under the age of 25, coupled with the prevalence of the Internet and the high rate of mobile device usage, is an important advantage of Vietnam in making a breakthrough for the game market.

Besides being a potential market in terms of revenue, Vietnam has for many years become a reliable “outsource” destination of major game publishers in the world.

According to Do, MIC is building a strategy for game development in the 2022-2027 period with an aim to design policies to protect and promote game manufacturing in Vietnam, reducing its dependence on foreign-published games and increasing the income of domestic firms, while preventing violations in the field.

At the same time, the sector will pay greater attention to human resources for game sector and build a network of global data centres to serve developers and publishers in the Vietnamese market.

Do advised local game production and publishers to coordinate with one another for long-term and sustainable development, while expanding their market and exporting their products to promote the culture and image of Vietnam.