VietNamNet Bridge – Analysts believe that it is now the golden age of mobile games,with revenue from the sector increasing steadily in the last few years.

Nguyen Tien Dung, business and marketing director of NCS Media, said the Vietnamese mobile game market has earned $2 million a month, or VND500 billion a year, in recent years.

Nguyen Van Tuan, a senior executive of VC Corp, who has returned from workshops in South Korea, Japan and China, said Vietnam was now considered the best market for mobile game trading in South East Asia.

Mobile gamesare the most popular mobile app in Vietnam, followed by mobile payment and taxi booking apps.

Meanwhile, mobile games haveseen the highest growth rate in the online game market.

Dung noted that the Vietnamese market in the past seemed to be reserved for foreign players only.

Domestic firms imported foreign games en masse to distribute domestically. However, many Vietnamese distributors have managed to make games as well.

He went on to say that a lot of Vietnamese IT firms are moving ahead with their plans to march towards the overseas markets.

Those plans have been encouraged by the success of Nguyen Ha Dong, the author of Flappy Bird, a game that conquered the hearts of millions of people around the world.

Tran Vinh Quang from Appota said Flappy Bird had 50 million downloads by the time Dong decided to take the game down from Apple’s store.

Flappy Bird was so successful and famous that, after it was taken down, a lot of “cloned” versions of the bird were put into app stores, and many game developers assumed Dong’s name when introducing their games.

According to Quang, Flappy Bird tops the list of the most outstanding mobile games that have appeared recently, followed by Chien Binh (Combatant).

Minh Chu (Enlightened King) was another famous mobile game cited by the director of SohaGame Bui Quang Minh.

The director believes that more IT firms and independent game developers will focus on making mobile games in the days to come as they are encouraged by huge incomes from different sources.

According to Minh, game developers can collect money through five channels.

First, gamers can download games free of charge, but have to pay for articles in the games. Second, game developers charge download fees. Third, game developers collect registration fees for services. Fourth, game developers earn money from ads. Fifth, they collect money from any combination of the above-said channels.

Analysts said that the rise of mobile games as smartphones become more popular in people’s daily lives is an inevitability.

Until 2011, the number of mobile games had been so modest that “it could be counted with the fingers”. But the games mushroomed within a short period from late 2012 to the end of the first half of 2013. PC-based games have lost a part of the market to mobile games.

TBKTSG/VNN