VietNamNet Bridge – Three reasons have been cited to explain why most of the young founders of Vietnamese mobile content firms have decided to start their business by developing games.
The mobile device market has been growing at a rapid rate in recent years with more and more people using smartphones for work and entertainment.
A report showed that games are the most popular mobile apps, while the number of games is five times higher than other apps.
Vietnam ranks 17th in the world and the fourth in Asia in mobile internet usage level. The figures show the great potential of the Vietnamese mobile game market, where small successes are enough to bring big revenue to startups.
High profits
The mobile game market is valued at VND500 billion per annum and the figure continues to rise.
Analysts say the profits are satisfactory, especially for startups. Online game distributors can expect revenue of $10 per user for MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Meanwhile, Card Battle and SLG can bring turnover of $6 and $5 per user, respectively.
Developing games on iOS has also been a priority for game firms, which realized that 60 percent of mobile game revenue comes from the iOS operating system.
In general, internet-based products have an international market, and so do mobile games.
Many Vietnamese games developed by Dvmob, Tofu Games, B-gate, Joy Entertainment, M.D, Colorbox, Emobi Games, ZoyGame and Weplay are popular on Apple Store or Google Play.
Flappy Bird, Freaking Math, Ninja Revenge and School Cheater are the most popular games recently.
Vietnam-made games have been exported to many countries, including China, which is a powerful game developer.
Shortage of funds
Lacking money to develop their ideas is believed to be the only weak point of Vietnamese game developers.
Some young founders of game studios attending OGDC 2014, an online game development workshop held some days ago, complained that they were meeting big difficulties in calling for investments to develop their ideas.
They have been advised to think of cooperating with game distributors. The success of Flappy Bird, a Vietnam-developed mobile game, in the world market has changed investors’ and distributors’ thoughts about the Vietnam’s mobile game industry development potentials.
Some game distributors have stated they are willing to support game studios to develop their games, from providing loans to distributing products.
Many game products have been brought into the world thanks to the cooperation. Emobi Games, for example, created “Dai Minh Chu” under cooperation with Soha Game, a distributor, while Joy Entertainment created “Chien Binh CS” under cooperation with CMN Online.
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