VietNamNet Bridge – Many information technology engineers have dreamed of establishing “Vietnamese game empires”, but they have realized that it is not that easy to make money with games.

 

 

In his “golden age”, Phan and his fellow-workers created Squad and Generation 3, which were exported to 10 European and Latin American countries in 2012.

But Phan later resigned from his post, leaving many plans unfinished. “The leaders did not want to make games anymore because games could not make much money as they expected,” he explained.

Phan now continues making games, but says that “making games is really a hazardous game”.

Will Nguyen Ha Dong’s successful Flappy Bird help Vietnam’s game industry take off? Will Flappy Bird give Vietnamese courage to conquer mobile game market?

“Dong is just the tip of a sinking iceberg,” he said.

He said Dong’s Flappy Bird was one in a million.

In Phan’s eyes, Dong was lucky because Flappy Bird accidentally hit gamers’ mark – their desire to conquer the bird.

Dong’s success with Flappy Bird and the reported great fortune he made with the bird has caused many others to think that they just need to create a game and post it on Apple Store and Google Play, and then they’ll  get rich.

However, that’s easier said than done.

In the Vietnamese market, locally-made games account for less than one percent of total games available. 

Though the market is huge, there is not much room for Vietnamese game developers, because the majority of games are illegally imported from China.

It takes at least three to six months and VND200 million a month to make a small mobile game. If the game is good, it can exist in the market for three to six months and bring a profit of VND300-400 million a month. However, the competition among game developers is stiff.

“Most of the games made by Vietnamese firms can’t sell. Therefore, Vietnamese firms have to act as game distributors and do the outsourcing for foreign partners to earn their living,” Phan noted.

This is why even VTC and FPT, the largest technology groups, have decided to remove game studios to focus on other business fields which can bring bigger profits. 

VNG, another “big guy”. has also scaled down its game operations, while focusing on distributing games and making small games.

A preliminary report showed that there are some 40 operational firms in the GMO market segment, including the “big guys” like VTC Mobile, Minh Chau Game Mobile, ME Corp, Teamobi, Smobi and Soha Game. There are also hundreds of independent game developers, who make the market more bustling.

However, if analyzing the figures, one would see that the turnover from GMO just accounts for a modest proportion in the total turnover of VND6 trillion the online game industry earned last year.

Doanh Nhan