Rise of Vietnam: Mobile Gaming Boom—Key Players, Winning Strategies & What’s Next

Speaker 1 So, do I get it right that what we are looking at is basically more robust hyper casuals, like let's call the super casuals, that are mainly

Speaker 1 ultra casuals, yeah, that are mainly driven by US traffic E CPMs

Speaker 1 from revenue side perspective and aiming there,

Speaker 1 and then whatever traffic they can add on top of it, but it's still mainly US needs to be the first.

Speaker 1 You can see here the active user base in the States is two million.

Speaker 1 It's it's It's massive.

Speaker 1 It's big, yeah, it's big. And I'm pretty sure

Speaker 1 these games have very low CPIs of

Speaker 1 how it looks like and what it actually does.

Speaker 1 Because it's kind of like, you know, like you see

Speaker 1 and you know what are you going to get immediately.

Speaker 1 It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice.
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Uh-huh.

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Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Look at you looking like Trump from Miami. You're so orange, man.
Where have you been?

Speaker 1 Did you spray paint yourself down in downtown Bratislava for this?

Speaker 1 What do you mean, where I've been? You recall. What do you spray paint?

Speaker 1 Look how orange you are.

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Speaker 1 Look good. I'm just jealous because it's like you see the two pale faces and then my little moussy snitch in the middle.

Speaker 1 Mr. Fail.

Speaker 1 Mr. Fail.
Yeah, well, welcome, everybody. We're already recording.
So welcome, everybody. My name is Mate Lancharic.
I'm Felix Brauberg.

Speaker 1 And we are your hosts. So thank you very much for coming.
I hope you enjoyed the release of our new album, which is called Quest for a Half Gamer. And

Speaker 1 there are two bonus tracks, which is

Speaker 1 UA Margarita, obviously, and Up Loving It. So,

Speaker 1 for those that are completely confused now, yes, Two and a Half Gamers has a music album. Exactly.
That's what we're talking about. Why? We'll leave it.
Why not?

Speaker 1 It's a little

Speaker 1 link in the show notes. It's available on Apple,

Speaker 1 Spotify, YouTube Music, all,

Speaker 1 it's everywhere, basically. So, okay.

Speaker 1 It's in a Spotify near you. Yeah,

Speaker 1 just

Speaker 1 type two and a half, 2.5 gamers, and then just go and

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Speaker 1 So dumb. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Yes, and absolutely.
I'm very proud

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 it's stupid, but it's amazing. People love it, and I love it as well.
Okay, so what are we talking about today? We're talking about Vietnam and their explosion on the mobile gaming scene.

Speaker 1 We are going to go through a bunch of rankings, and we're going to go through a bunch of the main leading Vietnamese gaming companies. We're going to look at some of their games.

Speaker 1 So, basically, everyone who's listening to this will be familiar with the absolute massive Vietnamese invasion that's been taking place on mobile for probably the last five years, I'd say.

Speaker 1 But it's now that it's really coming into a new gear, and a lot of people actually don't know these studios. And it's starting to be, yeah, they're in the top 25 studios in terms of downloads.

Speaker 1 Four of them are actually Vietnamese in December. So we'll start talking about that.
But, Matthia, do you think these studios do anything on the UA side? What do you think they do? I think so.

Speaker 1 They do something on the UA side.

Speaker 1 But the question is

Speaker 1 if they have enough money to do so because what happens if you don't have enough money Matte what do you

Speaker 1 then you can actually call our sponsors PVX partners because today's episode is brought to you by our sponsors PVX partners the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing so if you're scaling your game and your game business and you need funding here's the deal with PVX partners there is no equity dilution so you don't really need to sell your soul and you can repay as you get paid.

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You can find

Speaker 1 the link in the show notes as well.

Speaker 1 And then we can talk about your growth on the podcast. That's the main thing.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 1 Very smooth, I must say. Very smooth.

Speaker 1 Oh, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 1 Would you say this is the Vietnamese people will be

Speaker 1 able to watch the video?

Speaker 1 Ah, of course, because don't you worry.

Speaker 1 If you speak a Vietnamese speaker, or if you're a Turkish speaker, Russian speaker, or South Korean, or anything, basically, we have a bunch of really good subtitles.

Speaker 1 And all you have to do is click right down here, and we will be translated. But okay, you kind of threw me off there, so let's actually start because we've done too much jibber-jabber now.
So,

Speaker 1 I could literally see the loading bar over Felix.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, look at that. Yeah,

Speaker 1 two days in the day for him, and I'm blonde. So, yeah, it's gonna take a bit of time.
What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 okay, fine. Okay, so here is, uh, I pulled in the sensor tower.
So, this is a December 1st to December 31st Unified Downloads Top Publisher by Absolute Downloads, right?

Speaker 1 So at the top of the charts, on nearly 100 million downloads, you have Azure, which we've had on the podcast, very big, more hyper.

Speaker 1 Is there? I don't think that's a Vietnamese company. That's not a Vietnamese company.
I'm setting the stage. Just top of the charts, my father.
Okay, I'm setting the stage.

Speaker 1 So basically, at the top, you have exactly who you usually do.

Speaker 1 You have Azure, Say Games, Supersonic, Voodoo, Mini Clip, Embracer. And then then suddenly something really interesting happens, right?

Speaker 1 So at the seventh place, Outfit 7, we know Talking Tom, one of the biggest ad-monetized companies in mobile, and they are on 51.6 million downloads in December.

Speaker 1 But right under them, on the eighth place is iCame, which is 51.5 million downloads. So

Speaker 1 iCame, the studio from Hanoi, is about to overtake Outfit 7 in terms of absolute monthly downloads, right? Which is massive, right?

Speaker 1 So here's when we start actually seeing the Vietnamese companies.

Speaker 1 I came here. Felix, can you just scroll all up and collapse the chart so we don't have 20 places? Yeah.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 All right. Then after that, you have Supercent from South Korea.

Speaker 1 You have then Brave Stars at the 12th position, which is with 37 million downloads in December, which is Vietnamese. X Game Global, Vietnamese, 34 million.
Hungry Studio, that's not Vietnamese.

Speaker 1 But anyway,

Speaker 1 keep scrolling down. Abbey Games on 24th position with 21 million downloads.
And yeah. And then you have Abbey on the 32nd position with 15 million downloads.
ABI games. ABI, yeah.
Sorry, ABI.

Speaker 1 My fault, right? So Vietnamese studios are in a very serious way starting to rack up a lot of downloads. And if you actually

Speaker 1 go a bit deeper, and basically, what I filtered here by is top publisher by absolute downloads in Vietnam. Basically,

Speaker 1 there's so many gaming studios you can see here that have gotten more than a million downloads in one month.

Speaker 1 That basically you can see here that I keep scrolling down and I have to get to there's 60 studios or 57 studios that got over a million downloads that are based in Vietnam in December month.

Speaker 1 It's nuts, right? Insane. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this is why I'm saying it's a Vietnamese invasion. So, yeah, I was actually in Vietnam in, what was it, November for Games Forum.

Speaker 1 And I have to say, like, it's very exciting to be there because everyone is building a game. Everyone is keen to learn.

Speaker 1 And how I would describe Hanoi, I haven't been to Ho Chi Minh, where it's a second city where they do a lot of development as well.

Speaker 1 But what I think, or speaking to developers, i think it's a mix between helsinki and turkish so you have the turkish yeah listen to this so you have the turkish like attitude that you really work hard and you want to win but also these studios what they do is they sit down and share a lot of stuff so what i was told is that the ceos actually sit down and basically they actually share a lot of data on what games which is why you saw so many screw jam games right because actually they sit down and say This really works, we should help each other.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that's what I've heard. So, that's the analogy we're gonna go with.

Speaker 1 Anything that sticks out here that you guys think is kind of cool? It's

Speaker 1 confused, yeah. As you, as usual, when he doesn't talk, he looks confused, or

Speaker 1 whatever.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm looking forward to go to Vietnam for this Google program that I mean, and hopefully, you'll be in Felix as well, because uh, it's exactly the group that you just mentioned, the CEOs and the executives in a Google App slash games program where they share and learn, obviously.

Speaker 1 So and they want to hear about launching games, there is data pipelines, LTV projections, and

Speaker 1 all of the fun stuff, which is very close to my heart.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So let's start.

Speaker 1 Basically what I want to do now is I want to go through six of the main studios and basically show a couple of games, show what their portfolio looks like, and maybe you can hop in and show some of the UA creators, right?

Speaker 1 But the main thing here is that majority of the game publishers in Vietnam is exactly that. They're publishers, right? That means they're mainly driven by ad monetization, right?

Speaker 1 So it's very little IAP.

Speaker 1 You mentioned publishers. Is it because publishers, they publish the games of other studios?

Speaker 1 Oh, this is the admon meaning, right? So publisher in the sense of actually...

Speaker 1 they publish other games as well, but I'm meaning it more in the terms that they show abs, right? Okay, so as soon as you show an ad in admontization terms, you are a publisher.

Speaker 1 Anything you want me to explain there, Jakob? Because you look very grumpy.

Speaker 1 Move on.

Speaker 1 Can you

Speaker 1 can you do like a um cat expression? No.

Speaker 1 Someow.

Speaker 1 Okay, that's setting up. Basically, we have uh iCame here, right?

Speaker 1 And the interesting thing about these studios in Vietnam, I haven't had this explained to me, is like they have so many names right so iCame publishes under Zago they publish under iCame applications Dino Global Studios Zago Studio Jura Global Studio these are all the same company and I was in iCame's office and they just explained it like oh yeah we do it like that so

Speaker 1 tongue toed in

Speaker 1 yeah like they published that iMagic Global Studio this is all their studios right and

Speaker 1 their headcount I think they said was in the hundreds hundreds. They had two floors, but a very nice office in the middle of Hanoi.
Very swanky. It was very nice.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so this is kind of the flagship title of iCame.

Speaker 1 We've talked about this on one of the ad monetized episodes, but the crazy thing is, like, this is a racing game that's a bit more on the hyper-casual side. So

Speaker 1 in its lifetime, it has earned 230k in IAPs, which is not that much, right? Because it's gotten a quarter of a billion down. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 So it's pretty big. And you can see here that it's still scaling.
It's been out since January 2022 and it hit a peak in December,

Speaker 1 12.8 million downloads. So then the question is, when everybody's talking about

Speaker 1 how hyper-casual games are dead, what they like, what they know that they are still scaling and apparently earning a shit ton of money.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, this one is not like hyper-casual in the sense that, like, you pick it up and drop it because it's actually like, here I can show you, right? Like, this is actually a gameplay, right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you're racing.

Speaker 1 Yes. And this is very simple, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's very simple, right? But I don't really know what they do to keep the retention so high, but Jakub, I know you love these type of games. Like,

Speaker 1 any words of wisdom, or is racing just one of those things that you can just pile up a lot of ads without annoying people?

Speaker 1 Why is there so high of a level number?

Speaker 1 They have a lot of levels. Yeah, then there needs to be some kind of a level design play to this if it's like driven by that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or it's just all the same levels and just five hundred five or five five thousand. You never know.
I think it's also probably cars, right? Because here is here we go. Here you finish a level.

Speaker 1 What happens afterwards?

Speaker 1 Yeah, money, so you can buy better cars or better equipment.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 you start again.

Speaker 1 Can you skip to the part where is meta?

Speaker 1 I don't think they have it in here.

Speaker 1 That's where you actually fire this up in the emulator. Yeah, so you can actually, so you can actually check what's happening.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But if there's nothing involved, there's usually some upgrading method which could be pretty good. I mean, honestly,

Speaker 1 it made 200k, so there needs to be something that you can pay for. Yeah.
Obviously.

Speaker 1 Also, here, right, this is one of their other games that's like hitting the charge right now. It's called Bus Out.
This one we discussed when you were. Yeah, we discussed it as well, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which is more of a puzzler, right? So basically, they started with a race game. So what really enabled them to grow, right, was this car game because it's the one that like hit the charge first.

Speaker 1 And you can see here, basically, 46 million downloads in the last 30 days, which is crazy. And then car race is responsible for pretty much the majority of it.
And then also...

Speaker 1 They earned 3 million in the last

Speaker 1 30 days, which is IIP only.

Speaker 1 With 46 million downloads, I can imagine this is going to be like 10, 12. No?

Speaker 1 So I think or looking at this studio and like the types of downloads and what their portfolio is, this is making at least 500K a day in ads revenue on top of that, right?

Speaker 1 So it's like it's it's big like really big. You don't make it to the top 10 without making that much money on ads, right? So yeah,

Speaker 1 so they're based in Hanoi. And we're going to kind of see a trend going on here because the next studio that I wanted to talk about is Brave Stars,

Speaker 1 and basically, this is also a game that we covered on one of the admon episodes. That's kind of their flagship title, but they have a bit more

Speaker 1 games that are kind of the same size, but Fruit Merge, which is a game that we talked about before, that had the sneaky little

Speaker 1 banner placement. So, essentially,

Speaker 1 this is the one. Yeah, this is the first one.
This is the first, I think, this is the first one.

Speaker 1 That's what Travel Town is or copied before to use in the travels and now in the real creatives. Well, not real, but video creatives.

Speaker 1 But you can see here the downloads is crazy amounts.

Speaker 1 Averaging, what is this? This is by month, right? But let's say here by day.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 200k, 100k, 150k downloads a day.

Speaker 1 Quite big.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 And then also revenue.

Speaker 1 Yeah, small revenue, but

Speaker 1 the revenue is not really

Speaker 1 interesting that the US is still the biggest country regarding the downloads. It's the thing, and that's what we discussed before with Felix on his admon episodes.

Speaker 1 It's almost like almost all the time the US is either top one or top two. Rarely is the case that they are driving chiton of downloads from tier two or tier three countries.

Speaker 1 So the US is always up to up and there somewhere.

Speaker 1 Downloads from those also, like right after

Speaker 1 Mexico, Brazil,

Speaker 1 but it's important that the US is the first.

Speaker 1 And of course, 60% of revenue, which there is like very small amount comes from there. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, here we have the fruit merge gameplay, where essentially you drop fruits and they match.

Speaker 1 And then if it's the same fruit, it matches. It's very satisfying.
I played it quite a lot before. But yeah, this is Brave Stars.
And they also have.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine this

Speaker 1 being as

Speaker 1 being ev evolved

Speaker 1 something like sorting games in this like in this space that you go from fruit merging in in this exact way and then

Speaker 1 kind of yeah yeah yeah of course i i i i would say like

Speaker 1 rolek is already working on it yeah yeah yeah exactly because this makes so much sense yeah of course yeah in the rolek uh labs i'm sure someone is uh paying attention that's for sure uh they also have these other games right that are a bit more tailored to uh i would say the female audience.

Speaker 1 Let me scroll here for more time.

Speaker 1 Or, yeah.

Speaker 1 Paper doll diary. Okay.
Paper doll diary. It's

Speaker 1 pretty much exactly what you think it is. You dress up dolls.

Speaker 1 I didn't think about dressing up dolls. I would think if it's paper doll diary, then I would say, oh, well, I didn't see the dress-up to it yourself.

Speaker 1 Not that part.

Speaker 1 Well, essentially, you watch a lot of ads, right? There's no IAP revenue in this, but basically what they do is you exactly what it says, right? So

Speaker 1 you put it in cute little locations.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Where do you think you're going? So it slides to the interactive stories. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 or I would I wouldn't say to be the interactive stories. That's

Speaker 1 basically like stories.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like what I guess you used to do this type of play in real life when you're younger, I guess, and then now it's just on mobile

Speaker 1 probably

Speaker 1 what happens afterwards.

Speaker 1 Oh, wait a second, like I wanted to see how the how the story ended. How the story ended.
Oh, you want to see it? Sorry. Sorry.

Speaker 1 She writes the diary afterwards. Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay. So you screwed up an episode place, basically.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no interactions.

Speaker 1 No interactive stories.

Speaker 1 Hello, camera. Oh, that's a great Zoom.
That's a great Zoom on your boom arm. What are you doing?

Speaker 1 Hello,

Speaker 1 stop with that Zoom, huh? It doesn't work.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, it's great. Yeah, of course, of course, of course,

Speaker 1 it should troll you anyway. So, that's Brave Stars, right? So, they're also based in Hanoi.
Uh, the interesting thing here is, right, like, uh,

Speaker 1 so this is Brave Stars' website, right? So, you see the way it's set up, right?

Speaker 1 Very nice. And then, like, there's this kind of stuff like, I don't understand, like,

Speaker 1 there's so much stuff from the outside, like, I don't understand in Vietnam. And this is one of them.
So, this is Brave Star's website.

Speaker 1 And then you have the next studio that I want to talk about, which is called X Game Studios. And it's pretty much the same website, but it's just different colors and different fonts.

Speaker 1 So, it's like you scroll down, and then, like, yeah, there's

Speaker 1 ways here. Scroll up, scroll up.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 stop, stop, go down, go down, go to the S part, down, down, down, stop.

Speaker 1 What do you see?

Speaker 1 Space rivalry. Oh, yeah, it's

Speaker 1 something sus is going on.

Speaker 1 There we go. Yeah.
What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 So basically, like

Speaker 1 Among Us clone in the

Speaker 1 websites look super similar to me. So like, I don't know, like, if it's the Chinese way, like, if it's just, like, everything goes, or, like, it's just one template.

Speaker 1 Like, why would you even care about this thing?

Speaker 1 I mean, even if you care about it too much, it's just, oh, wait, these guys are not. No one cares, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, no one cares. I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we are the only people looking at the websites. Like, these days, like, nobody cares to me.

Speaker 1 People care, of course. Nobody cares as long as you don't have website integration for your game and web shop interface there.
That's

Speaker 1 when they should. Jakub doesn't have a website.
There you go.

Speaker 1 Not even his own work mail.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there you go.

Speaker 1 I bought him his domain and made it the work mail. And he never uses it.
Yeah, of course. Because it goes to spam immediately.
Woof. What a surprise.
Anyway, okay.

Speaker 1 What's up? Anyway, like these numbers for X-Game Studios, right? Like 1 billion downloads,

Speaker 1 3 million MAO,

Speaker 1 more than 100 staff and it's just like no one in the West knows these studios at all they're absolutely massive well we we talked uh I think uh when this airs the the Forex episode is already live uh if it's if it's not then we did an episode about Forex with JK and Justin and we were talking about how

Speaker 1 people just don't care about

Speaker 1 the Asia in in a sense that in a sense that like they are so far ahead of a lot of other people, people, they just don't care about Forex, and people don't care about Vietnam because they don't know

Speaker 1 and debate,

Speaker 1 don't follow, yeah, exactly. Don't follow the like what's happening.

Speaker 1 It's crazy, it's really crazy. It's exactly like the same thing with South Korea and

Speaker 1 Lucky Defense game

Speaker 1 until we talked about it.

Speaker 1 Nobody even knew about the game except Chinese.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, X Game Studios, 12 million downloads in the last 30 days. Their flagship game is anti-stress relaxing toy game.
I couldn't find any videos of this, and I didn't have time to download it.

Speaker 1 But basically, where did I heard this name?

Speaker 1 Anti-stress relaxing toy game.

Speaker 1 Gene W. Mr.
Gene W. What are talking about? Yeah, he had this anti-stress.
Yeah, yeah, he has this anti-stress stuff. Yeah.
Which was

Speaker 1 one of his top top games. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They have a motor racing game as well. 2.4 million downloads.

Speaker 1 Yeah, here it is.

Speaker 1 Oh, don't even go there, man. Like, come on.

Speaker 1 Man, it's impossible to find that gameplay because everything goes to probably the Moreno game.

Speaker 1 Or maybe I found it. Yeah, I found it.

Speaker 1 Baby games?

Speaker 1 No, it's not baby games. It's X Games.
Oh, no.

Speaker 1 X Game Studio. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, it's just, yeah, it's come on. Racing.
It looks exactly like Car Race race by ICAME, but it's with motorbikes. Yeah, so basically, very simplistic hybrids that are

Speaker 1 hybrids.

Speaker 1 This is ad monetized, like 100% or 95%. It's still a little bit deeper than hyper-casual.
So between hybrids and hyper-casual.

Speaker 1 Can you call that the casual?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Basically

Speaker 1 hybrid-ish. More robust.
Hyper casual. More robust.
Hybrid-ish.

Speaker 1 No, no, we need to come up with uh with a term for this this is how things are done in the gaming industry you come up with the term and then like everybody's like ah this is a great term so we need to come up with this

Speaker 1 anyway

Speaker 1 super casual oh jesus

Speaker 1 okay we don't have to come up with it now but we can yeah take some suggestions yeah yeah and then we have the probably one that confuses me the most right this is a bi and global i met them really nice people but basically they are the ones that kind of perfected this thing that has been dubbed ultra-casual.

Speaker 1 And Perfect Tidy, which we've covered on the podcast a couple of times,

Speaker 1 the game I can't say. Someone else wants to say it because I can't say it, so someone else say it.
That's your nemesis.

Speaker 1 Statisdom. No,

Speaker 1 statistom. No, statism, but satisfy satisfaction.
Satisdom.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Orange Man. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Anytime. Anytime.
Yeah, these games is essentially, this is Perfect Tidy, right? But what it is, it's you do a game that you don't really know what's that point of it.

Speaker 1 It's just little unique levels where you do something, and then they don't really tell you what it is, right? So here you have to have to sort a toolbox, and that's level 39.

Speaker 1 And then you can watch, if you don't know what you're doing, you can watch a rewarded video for a hint. And then you see interstitials between every level.

Speaker 1 But it's like silly, stupid things like this. There's often jokes like embedded in it.
But this is the gameplay, and they've taken this and it works so well in the states for some reason. Like,

Speaker 1 yeah, like

Speaker 1 satisfying, it's satisfying, it's really, really satisfying, and you don't really need to think too much. Well, I mean, you kind of need to solve these short puzzles, but just

Speaker 1 I don't want, I don't want to say it again, but just think about this in a way as a real short kind of

Speaker 1 play.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just

Speaker 1 you want to have 60 to 90 second experience in the game and as a level. They have that as

Speaker 1 one part of the show. And this is what you want.
And this is what people want as well, because it's very simple and very approachable as well. So

Speaker 1 I totally get that. And it's like, yeah, it works well in the US.
Extremely well.

Speaker 1 The crazy thing is here, when you change it to active user base, it's like nearly 2 million people in the States that play this. Like

Speaker 1 in the last 30 days. Yeah, it showed retention.
So do I get it right?

Speaker 1 That what we are looking at is basically more robust hyper casuals, like let's call the super casuals, that are mainly ultra casuals. Yeah, that are mainly driven by US traffic ECPMs.

Speaker 1 from revenue side perspective and aiming there and then whatever traffic they can add on top of it but it's still mainly US needs to be the first.

Speaker 1 You can see here, the active user base in the States is 2 million.

Speaker 1 It's massive.

Speaker 1 It's big, yeah, it's big. And I'm pretty sure

Speaker 1 these games have very low CPIs of

Speaker 1 how it looks like and what it actually does.

Speaker 1 Because it's kind of like, you know, like you see

Speaker 1 and you know what are you going to get immediately.

Speaker 1 And they kind of expanded on this, right? Because perfect Tidy

Speaker 1 say the game say it satisfom yeah and then tricky twist puzzle they're they're kind of all the same right like they're just different they're tailored towards different like

Speaker 1 target groups I guess because tricky twist puzzle is more for male perfect tidy I guess is a bit like both but yeah I guess they're just kind of cornering this little market that

Speaker 1 it's just really weird to me but works extremely well right wood nuts and bolts and puzzle so

Speaker 1 all these studios in Vietnam have one of these wood nut puzzles. I'm actually saving it for last.
So they also have a bus escape traffic jam.

Speaker 1 Of course. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of, what can you say, in a perfect way, a lot of cross-pollination happening between the Vietnamese studios.

Speaker 1 A lot of

Speaker 1 heavy inspiration. I'd say that way.
But that's the thing. I mean,

Speaker 1 I don't care if

Speaker 1 you don't really need to reinvent the wheel. But the thing is, they

Speaker 1 I mean, this is almost like Anatoly from Burning Games, right? So they take what works and they just make it a little bit differently.

Speaker 1 Or they, I'm pretty sure. Very well put.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you better go today, reflecting. This is good.

Speaker 1 But the UA trick is like strong part of it.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm trying to figure out because this is not only

Speaker 1 the game design play.

Speaker 1 These levels of downloads require a lot of UA. US downloads.
And US downloads. Exactly.
But society is probably earning 200K a day at least this title, right?

Speaker 1 So this thing won't work without the US traffic at all. It will, man.
No, no, no, no, no. It will.
It will.

Speaker 1 Because if this works and how did it work in US, you have very low CPIs. Very, very low CPIs.
Imagine these very, very low CPIs in tier 3 markets.

Speaker 1 I'm thinking sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know, but think also the ECPMs in those markets, which is also

Speaker 1 shit as you would seem.

Speaker 1 It's the retention that makes it, right? Like, if you have the users for long enough, they will at some point cross the LTV curve, right? Where basically the LTV will be higher than the CPI.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but day seven maximum, not more. I don't think like this is working on day 30.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 After day seven, it's there. Yeah, it's like you have until day seven.
Yeah, and you, you, yeah,

Speaker 1 we keep shifting users forever, and they suddenly go cross the LTM

Speaker 1 anyway. Moving on to a studio that's a bit different, also based in Hanoi, is Ammonotes, and they specialize in music games, right?

Speaker 1 So they have a

Speaker 1 did you say music? I know, we already talked about the music album. We released no, we released the music album.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we can ask if they can put it on magic tiles. Of course,

Speaker 1 God, this would be absolutely amazing. But this is their flagship title.
This is the one that's absolutely a

Speaker 1 behemoth. Yeah, I'm actually working with the guy sending regards.
I don't know. Very interesting thing.

Speaker 1 You take it over from here on this one. You probably know better than me.

Speaker 1 You also tell them to put quest for half camera in the fucking game. It should be easier than you actually.
I mean, it should be easy. So if you go into the whole portfolio,

Speaker 1 just to see, and by the way, I don't know what happened with the sensor tower thing, but we don't have a graph there anymore, unfortunately. But they have this

Speaker 1 very

Speaker 1 specific,

Speaker 1 how do you call it?

Speaker 1 Ah, there it is. How the do you call it? Yeah, because you need to click on downloads.
Yeah. Okay.
Okay. Anyway.

Speaker 1 So they have these very specific music rhythm games similarly to the ones that you remember from

Speaker 1 the days where you would have the machines where you would be dancing on those, like pressing the button with your feet, the

Speaker 1 arrows and stuff. Yeah, man, this can't be played on emulator.

Speaker 1 This is the biggest learning I got from working on this.

Speaker 1 I cannot play this thing on emulator. It's impossible.
It's impossible. Take your wife's phone.
No, no, no. It's impossible because you can't feel the music.
No, no, you can't.

Speaker 1 I saw you dancing and you dance like. And you need to use your fingers because if you think about the buttons that you're pressing, just the thought of thinking makes you too slow.

Speaker 1 It's too slow, yeah. You have to use your fingers.
This is unplayable in emulator.

Speaker 1 Phoebe can't play it either. If you play it.

Speaker 1 Guys, like, we're from countries that are not really known for their sense of rhythm. Like, none of us are Brazilian.
Like, have you ever heard, like, oh, a dance champion from Bratislava? Like,

Speaker 1 what are you talking about? Of course, yeah. He's now a little bit more orange than usual.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, man. But the thing is, like, they have very, very specific niche here for these rhythm-based games, and they do it super well.
And it's all

Speaker 1 difficulty-based in a way that the song increases in. It's a guitar hero.
What are they talking about? It's a guitar hero. It's basically a guitar hero version for mobile.

Speaker 1 And it's done very, very well. And

Speaker 1 they're just doing very interesting things. Can really say more.

Speaker 1 And is it true what I've heard that they're trying to get more IAPs? Because it's purely ad revenue before, but basically, I see the IAP curve going up. So they must.

Speaker 1 Is that you? Is that you? I can't really say more.

Speaker 1 So this is when they hired Yako.

Speaker 1 By the way, we talked about this and then we didn't mention BeatStar. Come on.
Yeah, BeatStar is the only other one, right? Like, that's their real competition. It's the Vietnamese market.
So I know.

Speaker 1 But yeah, we were talking about Guitar Hero, and then it's like, so it's almost like a Guitar Hero. Well, but this was much, much sooner than BeatStar.

Speaker 1 Yes, I understand like some of their first questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course, way,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 1 Way, okay. So

Speaker 1 they're in a battle to the death, huh?

Speaker 1 No, it's okay. Don't worry.
Anyway,

Speaker 1 it's a lot of IP,

Speaker 1 not a lot of IIPs versus the T ads in there.

Speaker 1 So now we're coming to the last studio that I want to talk about, and that's OneSoft, also known as Falcon Games. So basically, don't be confused.
This is Falcon Games, and OneSoft is the same.

Speaker 1 It's just one of these Vietnamese things.

Speaker 1 Don't know why. I would love to know why.
If you know why, please message us in our Slack group and

Speaker 1 join us there.

Speaker 1 The thing is, who cares? We talked about this with First Fun and River Game and all the other. There are so many entities.

Speaker 1 It's just.

Speaker 1 It's just the Vietnamese.

Speaker 1 So under Falcon Games, one of the other names is also Nam Ngo.

Speaker 1 This is also part of Falcon Games. I don't know why, but I know this is part of Falcon Games.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Cake Sorts is

Speaker 1 one of the biggest games, right? And you can see it's a nice little split on IAP and ad revenue.

Speaker 1 I think the Gold Sorting game is better and bigger. Yeah, the good sorting game is better, but we've already covered it, so I didn't want to do it.
We haven't talked about it. We didn't, but we will.

Speaker 1 Did we ever talk about the

Speaker 1 top

Speaker 1 scroller shooters on Abby portfolio? No, we never talked about it. No, we didn't talk about it.
No, I think we so many games in these studios are like genius, right? But here's cake sorts.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know, I know, this is this gameplay,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's it's

Speaker 1 it's fine. I think it's creative, yeah, yeah, I have multi multiple times.
Yeah, so so just saying the Galaxy Attack shooting game from Abby is past ninety million revenue lifetime

Speaker 1 90 or 90 90 90 and 260 million downloads

Speaker 1 there you go

Speaker 1 imagine this in Vietnam as well because like what's the what's the the average income in Vietnam it's nuts like these games must be like one of the biggest growing industries like it's just insane it's insane

Speaker 1 it's insane it's like

Speaker 1 but the latitude I really like the

Speaker 1 I would say approach to to work i guess like these games work hard right yeah yeah they work super hard yeah also i wanted to finish on this note because all studios vietnam pretty much have one of these and basically this screw puzzle they have a million names right but this was i guess one of the biggest trends last year where we've covered this on the podcast pretty much every studio now in vietnam that's how you know they're from vietnam they have a

Speaker 1 like a puzzle game a screw puzzle game and it's essentially a physics-based puzzler where you're solving

Speaker 1 things by pulling out screws and you watch a lot of ads. That's what you do.

Speaker 1 Can you give me the screen for a second? Just to kind of

Speaker 1 show the scale

Speaker 1 of the thing that we're, I guess, missing, because I guess we'll need to get to it at some point. So, what do you mean you're going to be able to do that? This is Abby Games portfolio.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And these are the numbers for the most downloaded games lifetime.

Speaker 1 Air Force airplane games, Galaxy Attacks, Space Shooter, Galaxy, Falcon, or in hundreds of millions of downloads, hundreds of millions of

Speaker 1 millions of IP revenue. Just saying.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the whole like wooden nuts bolts puzzle or whatever games we covered about them is just a drop in the bucket compared to what they achieved in this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but that's kind of in the past, right? So it's the same thing.

Speaker 1 It's in the past, of course. But just

Speaker 1 also what I just really want to say to anyone who's listening to this, right, is Vietnam is absolutely a beast in mobile gaming. And there shouldn't be a shadow of a doubt, right?

Speaker 1 It's just this is probably the hottest new country for mobile games, right? Wait a second. This is not fast.
Like, check, check. I know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like all these games are making half a million a month IP still. Yeah.
So we'll get to it at some point. We should cover all of them in one.
We should do one of these next week, huh?

Speaker 1 We should definitely do that.

Speaker 1 All of them, because this is the rise of Vietnam. The rise of Vietnam.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The only kind of problem with Vietnam these days, which is covering the news, is

Speaker 1 that the news is becoming a chin.

Speaker 1 We have to talk about that as well, right?

Speaker 1 Because they're becoming

Speaker 1 a little China right there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so the

Speaker 1 so who wants to pick this up?

Speaker 1 You can do it. Yeah, so quite a bit.
The LDR, it's not really something that we know much about. It's just that it's been run over the news this week.

Speaker 1 We know everything about it also you go mr smart s no no no we don't

Speaker 1 now so basically what what what's happening is that there needs to be something similar to chinese abn license so in order to run a game on and i guess it's only applies to app store for now not the end no it's google as well it's both as well it's both it's both so you need to get a number from government agency in order to be able to have your game on the store in vietnam

Speaker 1 in vietnam in Vietnam only. And then it, if I understand it, excl excludes Vietnamese companies.

Speaker 1 So because they want to level the f playing field for the the Vietnamese companies because they're they're they're a little bit soft policy compared to China, where even Chinese companies need the ISBN numbers and even Tencent has problem launching games there now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because the like the thing is what they say uh in a few of these articles, like for years unlicensed games distributed across sub store by foreign entities have created unfair competition for domestic game publishers.

Speaker 1 I mean, we just talked about the domestic game publishers, and I think they are better than half of the fucking industry at this point. Half?

Speaker 1 They're top 10 percentile, but like these guys are. So

Speaker 1 it's like they're doing quite well. But this is the thing is, we are talking about Vietnam, not about Vietnamese companies outside of Vietnam.

Speaker 1 That's the difference, right? Because what we talked about now is games, game companies, they are based in Vietnam, but they're targeting worldwide, not only Vietnam. The thing is,

Speaker 1 which might be the issue here with the foreign entities versus the local developers, is that I'm seeing, I work on a few games, and we like Vietnam is top three or top four market

Speaker 1 in terms of the IIPs.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's not like who cares about it. iOS or Android or both.
Both, both, both. It's 100 million people, right? Like this massive huge.

Speaker 1 It's not only about

Speaker 1 who cares about this because

Speaker 1 it's nothing.

Speaker 1 The biggest problem is like people were talking about this since November and December. Everybody's like, ah, it's coming, but nobody gives

Speaker 1 a fuck. And now they enforce this, like, oh my God, this is terrible.
It's like, yeah, well, like, come on, don't cry.

Speaker 1 you saw the news before and now everybody's like uh this is no you know this unfair for us blah blah blah well look

Speaker 1 at some point at every country can have these types of laws and if they want to protect their own companies and the revenues and whatever else then no we're getting very currently global trade war basically like if you look at like what's lately happening in the world like trumps slapping tariffs like we literally said he tariffs is the most favorite word in dictionary for him So yeah, we're getting there basically, where something like a soft China version of that app store policy is going to be applied on every single country.

Speaker 1 Yeah, look, it's like we are talking about this

Speaker 1 in different Slack groups and LinkedIn and everything. And like people from Vietnam and then Asia basically said, look, this licensing regulations are, I mean, it's nothing new.

Speaker 1 It's been here for many years. Many publishers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like it's

Speaker 1 and you know, like it's it says different things regarding the percentage, like ownership and whatever else that you need to actually have an entity in Vietnam and whatever else.

Speaker 1 Like, it's just people saying it's not the end of the world, and you know, you there's always a workaround and always will be.

Speaker 1 You just need to find a way how everybody else is doing it, and like the one in China, where you

Speaker 1 write your kitty or whatever adventure game, and suddenly it's a forex with an update.

Speaker 1 Or, oh, yeah, yeah, you just rent an ISBN. That's what I said.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Our nice, happy,

Speaker 1 what is it? Like, Hello Kitty T Adventure suddenly became a Forex with the latest update.

Speaker 1 Well, what can you do? So, so it's not the end of the world, and obviously, it's very fresh from the oven, all of these regulations, but still,

Speaker 1 don't cry me or either.

Speaker 1 All right, let's uh let's end it there.

Speaker 1 This was another fantastic episode on the Two and a Half Gamers podcast, where all industry leaders come to hear about what's going on in the world of mobile games. Yes.

Speaker 1 See you next time. Yes, see you next time.

Speaker 1 Sending regards to Vietnam.

Speaker 1 See you in a couple of months. Thank you very much.
Bye-bye. Bye-bye.