Alliance powering up game developers, illustration photo

With Vietnam in the top five leading countries in terms of blockchain technology, the Vietnam Games Development Alliance (VGDA) was officially launched on June 30 to boost the awareness and promotion of the tech in the gaming area.

According to data from the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), since 2020 the Vietnamese gaming market has grown by 10 per cent in terms of downloads. The nation is now one of the leading countries in Southeast Asia in terms of spending on games, increasing by 50 per cent in 2020 alone.

“The VGDA will carry out the mission to help Vietnamese games catch up with global trends, improve competitiveness with foreign businesses, build an image for products, and communicate about activities,” said Pham Anh Tuan, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, at the launch ceremony for the new alliance.

The group immediately attracted the participation of 40 members that are active in the field of online video games. The VGDA's coordination committee boasts 10 members, all of which are game developers and publishers such as VNG, Vietnam Esports, VTC Game, Gamota, Funtap, Viettel Media, and Solarpay.

The alliance will also undertake the task of reviewing and detecting games that may be in violation of rules such as unlicensed operations and copyright infringements.

The VGDA will contribute comments on policies to improve legal documents related to the game industry, cooperate to develop talent incubators and improve the quality of human resources, and set the development orientation of the game industry.

The emergence of the alliance is expected to open up strong development opportunities for the Vietnamese game industry, especially amid the rise of blockchain and NFT games in Vietnam. Domestic game developers are being empowered to compete fairly with other countries and contribute to making gaming a real profession in the future.

According to the latest report from the MIC, total revenues of Vietnam’s game industry in 2021 was estimated to be VND14.5 trillion ($630 million), up 11 per cent over 2020. It is expected that Vietnam’s game industry will reach a scale of nearly VND16 trillion ($695 million) by the end of this year.

The rapid growth of the market has become a stimulant for Vietnamese game developers to quickly launch new products.

Following the success of Flappy Bird in 2013 on Android and iOS, which at one point reached 50 million downloads and pulled in an average of $100,000 per day in revenues generated from in-app ads, later games have increasingly reaffirmed the position of Vietnamese game makers and creators, especially when the GameFi trend started to spread with the application of blockchain tech.

But Nguyen Xuan Yen, representative of DJinn Guild Game, admitted to facing many difficulties in the process of establishing his game in particular. “The barriers from the unclear legal corridor and doubts about transparency in blockchain have hindered the development of Vietnamese blockchain games,” he said.

Still, thanks to this new platform, Vietnam is asserting its position not only as a processing factory but also able to release influential games in the world.

According to Data.ai, the average daily time spent gaming by Vietnamese people is 3.9hrs, roughly 10 per cent more than the average user in the US. Vietnam also ranks second across Southeast Asia in terms of game downloads, after Indonesia.

In recent times, many blockchain projects and products founded and implemented by Vietnamese people have become global phenomena, such as Axie Infinity, Kyber Network, and Coin98, with market capitalisation of hundreds to billions of dollars.

“More game projects are born and are funded by international investment funds. Through games, Vietnam can spread its culture to the world and can absolutely become a new gaming capital,” said Lynn Hoang, head of Binance Southeast Asia.