Vietnam can lead Southeast Asia in mobile games: Google

Vineet Tanwar, Google Play business development manager for Thailand and Vietnam, said Vietnam has a lot of potential to lead the mobile game market in Southeast Asia in the near future.

"Young, intelligent, creative and professional staff with good vision and high aspiration for success, along with a large number of players are factors that will boost this industry in Vietnam," he said at the Indie Games Accelerator (IGA) held Wednesday in Singapore.

He hoped that the world will not stop at knowing Vietnamese mobile game for Flabby Bird, but for a long list of other games.

Flappy Bird was released in May 2013 with little fanfare. By February 2014, the sleeper hit topped the charts in more than 100 countries and had been downloaded more than 50 million times.

Vietnam’s mobile game market is growing at more than 50% year-on-year, according to a joint study by Google and Temasek Holdings.

The country’s internet economy is expected to jump from US$9 billion this year to US$33 billion in 2025, the third biggest in the region after Indonesia and Thailand, the report said.

In October, a report by US-based Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and Ho Chi Minh City-based market research firm Decision Lab said Vietnam’s mobile gaming segment has been on an exponential growth trajectory and is expected to have around 40 million mobile gamers by 2020 compared to the current number of 28 million.

The report also revealed that Vietnamese users spend an average of 51 minutes a day playing mobile games, over five-seven sessions.

Kunal Soni, Business Development director of Google Play in Southeast Asia and India, told the IGA event that most Vietnamese mobile games are for good quality, citing Heroes Strike as an example.

Nguyen Dinh Khanh, founder and CEO of WolfFun, an indie mobile game developer based in HCM City, said he also believes Vietnam is a potential market for mobile games thanks to the strong growth of smartphone in the country.

A report issued in January this year by We Are Social, a social media marketing and advertising agency, said around 75 million, or almost 80% of the population in Vietnam use smartphones and 53% of them usually play games on the device.

Some developers outside Vietnam told the event that they want to have products made in Vietnam.

"Vietnamese engineers are of better quality and cost less than those in the US or the Republic of Korea and we want to invest in this market," said Trung Hieu Nguyen, who represented Autum Interactive, a developer based in Singapore.

Indie Games Accelerator is a four-month program for top indie game startups from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam who are looking to supercharge their growth on Android.

This is a special edition of the Launchpad Accelerator program, designed in close collaboration with Google Play, featuring a comprehensive gaming curriculum and mentorship from top mobile gaming experts.

In August, Caravan War, a strategic game in which players defend their base by building towers that can attack the enemy, hit the Korean Google Play Store on August 8 and was listed as one of the most favorite new games.

The game, made by Vietnamese developer Hiker Games, has also stayed in the top 15 paid games of the Chinese Apple Store since it became available for Chinese users in June. It even reached the fourth place on this list at some point. No other game in the list was made by a Vietnamese developer.

It was the first time a made-in-Vietnam mobile game was imported to the South Korean and Chinese markets.