VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese game firms have gained initial success in the battle to regain the domestic mobile game market.

A report from VNG Game Studio shows that the products developed by the firm had served 11,315,517 gamers in 233 countries by the end of 2014.

The number of VNG game users in the last month increased by 1.7 times over the same period last year, while the number of new users increased by 3.3 times.

With 20 games launched, including  three exported products, VNG’s game development unit saw turnover growing by 20 percent in 2014 in comparison with the year before.

Nguyen Nhat Tuyen, director of VNG’s Game Development Unit, Dead Target, said one of the three exported products had received 7 million downloads since July 2014, when it hit foreign markets.

“We are now focusing on developing mobile games,” Tuyen said, adding that the mobile game market has great potential.

Le Giang Anh, managing director of JOY Entertainment JSC, noted that 2014 was a prosperous year for the Vietnam’s game industry.

“Emobi and Zoy games brought successes far beyond our expectations,” Anh said.

“We only launched one new game in 2014, but we had turnover higher by 10 times than in 2013,” he noted.

Ha Trung Hieu, a senior executive of Soha Game, said that Vietnam is still a small market, but the industry had prospered.

“A lot of new game studios have turned up, and here are more mobile game programmers. Game firms feel delighted because they now can earn money,” he said, adding that Soha Game launched 22 games in 2014 alone and opened 1,000 servers.

When asked about the game market prospects for 2015, an analyst noted that developing mobile games was the best solution for Vietnamese firms, which have limited capital and workforce.

“Though the demand is on the rise, the PC game market segment is getting narrower,” he explained.

Anh said that this year games similar to Chinese ones and games which allow developers to recover investment capital quickly will both be developed. High-quality and online games will also be part of the trend.

He noted that distributors now tend to spend big money on mobile games, because they believe mobile games are the future of the Vietnamese game industry.

However, he warned that unhealthy competition with illegally distributed foreign games would block Vietnamese game firms.

The participants at the 2014 OGDC, a conference of mobile game developers, heard that Vietnam became the largest online game market in South East Asia in 2013 and remains so. It is also, the sixth largest in Asia and the 25th largest in the world, with total turnover of $233 million.

NLD