Foreign resources and market know-how give rise to gaming

On February 28, VNG Corporation announced that it has become a strategic partner of Riot Games in the release of the company’s games in the Vietnamese market

The game Legends of Runeterra will open the combination between VNG and American video game developer Riot Games. This caused a stir in the Vietnamese gaming community because Riot had previously cooperated with Garena, a top Singaporean online game publisher.

The move comes as Vietnamese game enterprises are increasingly choosing to cooperate with foreign enterprises to increase their strength, instead of simply outsourcing to foreign enterprises or finding their own way to develop.

The general manager of Riot Games in Southeast Asia said, “We have decided to choose VNG as a strategic partner of Riot Games to release games in the Vietnamese market and look forward to building a long-term cooperation relationship with VNG to develop the player community here.”

While Riot Games is a developer, publisher, and organiser of video game tournaments owned by Chinese giant Tencent, VNG is considered a symbol of the Vietnamese gaming industry, with 15 years of experience in the tech arena.

Meanwhile Anantarupa Studios, a game development company from Indonesia, signed an MoU with VTC Telecom a fortnight ago to jointly exploit and develop the online game market in Vietnam. Under the agreement, the company will bring Lokapala, its first Indonesian esports game, to the Vietnamese market.

Lokapala is focused on registering a licence in Vietnam by the end of March and wishes to launch a beta version soon after, while expanding its services to three countries in Southeast Asia.

VTC Telecom as co-publisher will focus on Lokapala’s payment gateways, esports schemes, and localisation of the game in the Vietnamese market. Additionally, its goal is to increase intellectual property exports to a total of 100 billion rupiah (about $6.5 million) over the same time period. VTC has 17 years of experience in game publishing and a 20 per cent market share in terms of mobile games in this country.

CEO of Anantapura Ivan Chen said, “The game industry is the world’s largest content industry, contributing transactions worth more than $300 billion, which is three times greater than the film industry globally.”

Last year, VTC also signed a strategic cooperation agreement for 2022-2025 with Microsoft in esports, promoting the application of tech to expand products and build an innovation centre for game startups in Vietnam.

According to data from SafeBettingSites, the world currently has about 3 billion people playing games and by 2030, this is expected to increase to 4.5 billion. Asia is currently the largest and fastest growing game market.

Online game product developers in Vietnam are facing many legal problems related to their activities. The first is that the current regulations on licensing procedures for online games are often very complicated and lengthy.

Gaming in Vietnam continues to be exceedingly popular, but developers are still in a weak position due to outdated regulations.