VietNamNet Bridge – More than 70 percent of games are developed specifically for smartphones, while thousands of new games are downloaded every day. With such growth, the future is bright for the mobile game industry.
The great success of Flappy Bird, a Vietnamese mobile game, in the world market in early 2014 gave Vietnamese game firms a push.
Flappy Bird showed that the mobile game market has high potential, in which programmers have equal opportunities to create games asNguyen Ha Dong did with Flappy Bird.
Le Hong Son, director of a game development studio in Hanoi, said he began focusing on developing apps and games on mobile devices instead of websites in 2013.
However, he could see the great potential of the mobile game market some years before, when smartphones became more popular in the world.
Vietnam is believed to be one of the biggest game markets in South East Asia. With the strong technology development and the popularization of smartphones, mobile games have favorable conditions to develop, according to Son.
Pham Cong Hoang, Deputy CEO of FPT Online, noted that the success of Flappy Bird has “awakened the Vietnamese game development community”. Many programmers, who specialize in developing PC games, encouraged by Flappy Bird, have joined the mobile game market.
Developing mobile game proves to be a great choice for young programmers and start-ups, because it does not require overly high invested capital.
“You need to pay for office expenses and workers’ salaries, but this is not too much. The most difficult thing you need to do is to find a team of qualified game developers,” Son said.
Le Hoang Duong, a 28-year old freelance programmer, who developed a mobile game three months ago with his own money, confirmed that one does not need to spend too much money to develop games.
“The most important thing you need to do is to have good idea,” Duong said, adding that “rescue your pet” was the main idea of his game.
According to Son, one of the reasons which prompt young programmers focus on developing games is that they can make big money quickly.
The major income of game mobile developers is believed to come from ads.
After finishing developing a game, the author can post the game into big app markets such as Google Play or Apple Store.
On average, developers can earn $0.02 from every game download. As such, a game developer can earn $1,000 if his game has 50,000 downloads.
Son said the income can also come from other sources, including download fees and In-app Purchases.
According to Mwork, Vietnam’s mobile game market’s scale in 2014 is expected to be nearly equal to the PC game market with the value of $210 million, or 3.5 times higher than in 2012.
The PC game market has seen growth slowing down with the revenue of $220 million in 2012 to $291 million in 2014.
Meanwhile, a report of Newzoo, a market analysis firm, showed that there are 1.747 billion gamers worldwide, including 1.2 billion people playing games on their mobile devices.
VNE