Behind the growth story lies a deeper question about regulation, investment, and competitiveness.

For the first time, Resolution 80 recognizes video games as a cultural industry. The question now is how Vietnam can turn its advantages in talent, technology, and market size into a competitive edge, allowing the domestic game industry to retain more of the value created by Vietnamese developers.

Vietnamese studios have generated around 4.9 billion game downloads worldwide. On average, one out of every 25 game downloads globally comes from a product developed by Vietnamese creators. Vietnam has about 54.6 million gamers, ranking eighth in the world and second in Southeast Asia by download volume.

Industry revenue reached $525 million in 2024 and is projected to rise to more than $1.6 billion in 2025, before reaching around $2.4 billion by 2029.

Few digital industries in Vietnam can claim both tens of millions of users and billions of global downloads like the online gaming sector. Yet behind these impressive figures lies a paradox that few Vietnamese digital industries face.

Vietnam is among the world's leading producers of mobile games, but 85 percent of legally licensed G1 games released in Vietnam originate from foreign developers, most of them from China.

In other words, Vietnamese developers make games for the world, but Vietnamese players are still primarily consuming foreign games.

That is compounded by the fact that Vietnamese game startups choose Singapore rather than Vietnam as their place of incorporation.

Vu Tu Thanh, acting regional marketing director and Vietnam representative of the US-ASEAN Business Council, raises a thought-provoking question. Why do so many Vietnamese technology and gaming entrepreneurs establish legal entities abroad?

Those questions form the starting point of the report Vietnam's Gaming Industry: Improving Regulatory Mechanisms to Unlock Growth Potential, whose lead author is Nguyen Minh Duc, a public policy specialist at the US-ASEAN Business Council.

According to the study, about 80 percent of investment capital flowing into Vietnamese startups has historically gone to entities incorporated in Singapore. 

In the gaming sector, companies headquartered in Vietnam account for only around 22 percent of the market's revenue. Of roughly 200 registered gaming companies in the past, fewer than 20 remain actively operating today.

These figures raise a question: If Vietnam has one of the region's most dynamic game development communities, why is the vast majority of the economic value not retained domestically?

What is particularly unfortunate is that most entrepreneurs who leave do not necessarily want to leave Vietnam. They are simply looking for a place where turning an idea into a product and bringing that product to market is easier.

Policy decisions lag behind industry growth

Nguyen Minh Duc said the biggest bottleneck is not the shortage of developers, ideas, or market demand. The problem lies in the gap between the industry's development speed and the velocity of the regulatory system.

Currently, gaming enterprises must navigate a two-tier licensing mechanism: licensing for the enterprise itself and licensing for each individual product. A single application dossier can span from 200 to 500 pages and must undergo multiple vetting rounds before reaching the market.

According to a lawyer specializing in online gaming consultancy, even when the paperwork is processed smoothly, completing all licensing procedures typically takes 4 to 4.5 months. 

For online games, that timeframe is sometimes long enough for a business window to shut before the product can ever reach players.

Unlike many traditional fields, the gaming industry operates at an incredibly fast pace. A new trend can emerge and vanish in just a few months. According to Duc, it is precisely this procedural latency that causes many enterprises to miss the "golden time" to launch their products. 

In the online gaming world, a delay of a few months does not merely diminish competitive edge; it often equates to losing the opportunity to recoup investment capital entirely.

Tu Giang