A mobile music game from Vietnamese publisher Amanotes. Việt Nam’s mobile gaming market has huge growth potential due to the popularity of gaming and enormous number of smartphone users. – VNS Photo Việt Dũng

HCM CITY – Việt Nam’s mobile game market has huge potential and games can become one of the country’s major exports, experts have said.

According to the mobile market data and analytic platform App Annie, in 2020 game companies from Việt Nam ranked seventh in terms of downloads in the world and second in South East Asia.

For every 25 games downloaded, one was made in Việt Nam.

Việt Nam is home to a lot of mobile app and game publishers and has a heavily mobile-first consumer base, according to App Annie.

There are 68 million Vietnamese smartphone users, and the average daily time spent on gaming is nearly four hours.

Vũ Quốc Huy, director of the Ministry of Planning and Investment's Việt Nam National Innovation Centre, said game revenues topped VNĐ12 trillion ($519.2 million) in 2020, double the 2015 value.

Gaming consumer spending grew by 50 per cent in 2020, according to App Annie.

Flappy Bird, a Vietnamese-made game for smartphones, became a global sensation in 2014, and since then many other local game companies have made a big impact on the global market.

Last year the country’s Amanotes announced total downloads of over one billion, making it the number one game publisher by downloads across Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia.

Trâm Nguyễn, country director for Google Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, said her company had been aiding applications developers and start-ups in Việt Nam for a decade with networking and training events.

Nguyễn Quang Đông, rector of the Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development in Hà Nội, said that Việt Nam’s video game industry had huge potential and is currently Việt Nam’s only digital product export to the world.

But there were misconceptions and prejudices towards game businesses, and changing society’s outlook and getting rid of legal barriers could help boost the development of the industry, he said.

Understanding and identifying the video game industry as a high-potential digital industry could help Việt Nam come up with new policies and make changes to existing regulations to enable its growth, he added.

Global revenues from video games grew by 9 per cent in 2020 to US$159.3 billion, with mobile-only games revenues accounting for half the figure. – VNS