VietNamNet Bridge – Flappy Bird and Nguyen Ha Dong have kindled the hope about the development of the Vietnamese online game industry (GMO). However, experts say too many difficulties are still ahead.

How large is Vietnam’s GMO market?

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, FPT, VNG 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.

According to VTC Mobile, in 2011, its turnover from GMO was only VND100 billion. The figure was double in 2012 and then reached VND300 billion in 2013. The majority of revenue from GMO come from the fees collected from gamers, SMS and ads.

VTC Mobile, Minh Chau Game Mobile and ME Corp are believed to be the biggest guys in the market with 23 percent of the market share for each by the end of 2012.

Most of the GMO firms in Vietnam are descended as the distributors of the games for PC (personal computers) who have just joined the GMO community over the last two or three years. They include VNG, VTC and FPT.

The number of games they have made so far remains modest, while the games cannot attract many gamers.

VNG, which is considered the biggest online game producer, also has made only some games, including Famery, now available on Android and iOS.

Meanwhile, ME Corp only focuses on distributing Chinese and South Korean games, while it does not gather strength on making games. To date, it has made only eight games which have been put on app stores.

Do Viet Phuong from CMN Online, an online game firm, said though GMO gathers a lot of powerful companies and independent programmers, the Vietnamese GMO industry remains very much a fledgling.

“The number of games made by Vietnamese programmers and studios is so modest that they can be counted with your fingers,” he noted.

“Most of the existing firms focus on distributing foreign games, especially Chinese and South Korean ones. The success of Nguyen Ha Dong is just very occasional,” he said.

Vietnam lacks financial power and skilful labor force

According to Phuong, Vietnamese firms do not want to spend big money to develop GMO because of their limited finance and workforce capability.

“We are seriously lacking the good engineers for programming games,” he said. “Vietnamese still don’t have the understanding about games good enough to create the games attractive to gamers.”

Game development firms need to be financially powerful enough to employ their workforce with qualified and creative programmers who can regularly generate new ideas and new games.

In general, game producers and distributors target Android, Windows Phones and iOS, the popular operation systems, so as to approach the majority of customers.

Meanwhile, one of the weak points of many Vietnamese games is that they cannot run “smoothly” on the operation systems.

TBKTSG