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

Do I get it right that what we are looking at is basically more robust hyper-casuals, like let's call them super-casuals, that are mainly driven by US traffic ECPMs 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. You can see here,

the active user base in the States is 2 million.

It's massive.

It's big, yeah, it's big.

And I'm pretty sure like these games

have very low CPIs of like how it looks like

and what it actually does.

Because it's kind of like, you know,

like you see and you know what are you going to get immediately it's 4 a.m and we're rolling the dice mate drops knowledge made of gold and ice felix with ads making those coins rise jackup designs world's chasing the sky we're the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking ua adverts and game design too mateish feeling shackle bringing the insight We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight Matej, UA, master eyes on the prize Tracking data through the cyberspace skies Felix acts colors like a wizard in disguise Jackups, craft the realms, lift us to the highs Two and a half gamers talking smack Slow hockey stick, got your back Ads are beautiful, they light the way Click it fast, don delay look at you looking like trump from miami you're so orange man where you been what did you spray paint yourself down in downtown bratislava for this what do you mean where i've been you look how orange look how orange you are i'm not orange i'm quite brownish look good i'm just jealous because it's like you see the two pale faces and then a little moussey snitch in the middle. Moussey snitch.
Mr. Pale.
Yeah, well, welcome everybody. We're already recording, so welcome everybody.
My name is Matej Lantaric. I'm Felix Broberg.
And I'mokobremier 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 there are two bonus

there are two bonus tracks

which is

UA Margarita, obviously

and Uploading It

for those that are completely

confused now, yes

200 Half Gamers has a music album

Thank you. a margarita obviously and uploading it so 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 a link in the show notes it's available on apple spotify youtube music all it's it's everywhere basically.
So, okay. It's in a Spotify near you.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just type 2.5 gamers and then just go and check it out.
It honestly could be the stupidest thing that brought me the most joy ever. So dumb.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yes. And absolutely.
I'm very proud because 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. 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 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 but it's now that it's really coming into a new gear and a lot 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. Four of them are actually Vietnamese in December.
So we'll start talking about that. But, Mathieu, do you think these studios do anything on the UA side? What do you think they do? I think so.
do something on the ua side and uh but the the question is if they have enough money to do so because what happens if you don't have enough money marty what do you do then then you can actually call our sponsors pvx partners because today's episode is brought to you by our sponsors pX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing.

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You can find the link in the show notes as well. And then we can talk about your growth on the podcast.
That's the main thing. Nice.
Very smooth, I must say. Very smooth.
Wait, wait, wait. Would you say the Vietnamese people will be able to watch the video? Of course, because don't you worry.
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. 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.
I could literally see the loading bar over Felix. Yeah.
Two days in Games Forum and I'm blonde. So yeah, it's going to take a bit of time.
What are you talking about? Okay. Okay, fine.
Okay. So here is, I pulled in the sensor tower.
So this is a December 1st to December 31st unified downloads, top publisher by absolute downloads, right? 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. Is there, I don't think that's a Vietnamese company.
That's not a Vietnamese company. I'm setting the stage the stage just up on the charts man okay i'm setting the stage so basically at the top you have exactly who you usually do who you are you have zor say games supersonic voodoo mini clip embracer and then suddenly something really interesting happens right so at the seventh place outfit seven we

know talking tom one of the biggest ad monetized companies in mobile and they are on 51.6 million downloads in december but right under them on the eighth place is i came which is 51.5 million downloads so i came the studio from h from Hanoi, is about to overtake Outfit7 in terms of absolute monthly downloads, right? Which is massive, right? So here's when we start actually seeing the Vietnamese companies. So you have I came here.
Felix, can we just scroll all up and collapse the chart so we don't have 20 places? Yeah. Thank you.
All right. Then after that, you have SuperSense from South Korea.
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. But anyway, keep scrolling down uh 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 my fault right so Vietnamese studios are in a very serious way starting to rack up a lot of downloads and if you actually uh go a bit deeper and basically what i filtered here by is top publisher by absolute downloads in vietnam basically there's so many gaming studios you can see here that have gotten more than a million downloads in one month.
That basically you can see here that I keep scrolling down and I have to get to the 60 studios or 57 studios that got over a million downloads that are based in Vietnam in December month. It's nuts, right? It's insane.
Yeah. 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 yeah and i have to say like it's very exciting to be there because everyone is building a game everyone is keen to learn and how i would describe hanoi i haven't been to ho chi minh where it's the second city where they do a lot of development as well 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 so yeah that's what i've heard so that's the analogy we're gonna go with okay anything that sticks out here that you guys think is kind of cool it's confused yeah as you as usual when he doesn't talk he looks confused or whatever now i'm looking forward to to go to to vietnam for this google program that i mean and hopefully you'll be in Felix as well because 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 and they want to hear about launching games games there's data pipelines ltv projections and all of the all of the fun stuff which is uh very close to my heart yeah so let's start well 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 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 so it's very little IAP but you mentioned publishers is it because publishers they publish the games of other studios? This is the Admon meaning, right? So publisher in the sense of actually publish other games as well, but I'm meaning it more in the terms that they show ads, right? So as soon as you show an Admonization terms, you are a publisher.
Anything you want me to explain there, Jakob? Because you look very grumpy. Move on.
Can you do like a cat expression? Meow. Meow.
Okay. That's setting the board.
So basically, we have ICAM here, right? 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 ICAM publishes under Zego. They publish under i came applications dino global studios zago studio jura global studio these are all the same company and i was in i came's office and they just explained it like oh yeah we do it like that so tong to din yeah they published that i magic global studio this is all their studios right It's the i think they said was in the hundreds they had two floors a very nice office in middle of hanoi very swanky it was very nice yeah anyway so this is kind of the flagship title of i came uh we've talked about this on one of the Ad Monetize episodes, but the crazy thing is, like, this is a racing game that's a bit more on the hyper-casual side.
So in its lifetime, it has earned 230K in IAPs, which is not that much, right? Because it's gotten a quarter of a billion downloads. Jesus Christ.
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.

12.8 million downloads.

So then the question is, when everybody's talking about how hyper-casual games are dead,

what they know that they are still scaling and apparently earning shit ton of money 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 hey i can show you right like this is actually the gameplay right so you're racing yes and this is very simple right but i don't really know what they do to keep the retention so high but jakob i know you love these type of games 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 why is there so high of a level number?

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.

Yeah.

Or it's just all the same levels and just 500 of them.

5,000.

You never know.

I think it's also probably cars, right?

Because here we go. Here you finish a level what happens afterwards you have money so you can buy better cars or better equipment and then then you start again can you skip the part where it's? I don't think they have it in here.

That's where you actually fire this up in the emulator.

Yeah, emulator.

So you can actually check what's happening.

Yeah.

Anyway.

But if there's nothing involved, there's usually some upgrading meta, which could be pretty good.

I mean, honestly's it it made

200k so there needs to be something that you can pay for yeah obviously 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 discussed it as well right yeah 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 first 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 majority of it and then also they earned 3 million in the last last 30 days which is iip only yeah with 46 million downloads i can imagine this is going to be like 10 12 no 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 ad revenue on top of that, right? So 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.
Yeah. So they're based in Hanoi, and we're going to kind of see a going on here because the the next studio that i wanted to talk about is brave stars 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 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 uh the banner uh placement so essentially this is the first one this is the first one this is the i think this is the first one that's what the travel town is or copied before to to use in the labels and now in the in the real creatives well not real video creatives.
But you can see here the downloads is crazy amounts. Averaging, what is this? This is by month, right? But let's say here by day.
Yeah, 200K, 100K, 150K downloads a day. Quite big.
Yeah, okay. And then also revenue.
Small revenue, but probably... Revenue, come on.
Revenue is not really IMP. It's interesting that the US is still the biggest country regarding downloads.
That's what we discussed before with Felix on his Admon episodes. Almost all the time, the US is either top one or top two.
Rarely is the case that they're driving a shit ton of downloads from tier two or tier three countries. So the US is always up to up in there somewhere.
There's a shit ton of downloads from those also, like right up to the US. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course, of course. India, Mexico, Brazil, stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's important that the US is the first.
And of course, 60% of revenue, which there is like very small amount, comes from there. Yeah.
Well, here we have the fruit merch gameplay, where essentially you drop fruits and they match, and then if it's the same fruit, it matches. It's very satisfying.
I've played it quite a lot before. But yeah, this is Brave Stars, and they also have...
Can you imagine this being as being evolved something like sorting games in this space that you go from through it merging in this exact way and then just kind of yeah of course I would say like rolling is already, exactly. Because this makes so much sense.
Yeah, of course. Yeah.
In the Rollick labs, I'm sure someone is paying attention. That's for sure.
They also have these other games, right, that are a bit more tailored to, I would say, the female audience. Let me scroll here from old time.
Where are you? Paper Doll Diary. Paper Doll Diary.
It's pretty much exactly what you think it is. You dress up dolls.
I didn't think about dressing up dolls. I would think if it's Paper Doll Diary, then I would say, well, I didn't see the dress up to it yourself Well essentially you watch a lot of ads right there's no IAP revenue in this but basically what they do is exactly what it says right and then you put it in cute little locations Okay I don't think you're going.
So it's sliced with interactive stories?

Yeah.

I wouldn't say

with interactive stories.

That's...

This is basically like...

Yeah.

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.

Probably. What happens afterwards? Oh, wait a second.
I wanted to see how the story ends. How the story ends? Sorry.
She writes the diary afterwards. Okay.
Okay know that is out place basically yeah yeah yeah so no no interactive stories no hello camera that's a great zoom that's a great zoom on your boom arm what are you doing hello stop that zoom it doesn't work it's great yeah of course of course yeah of course it should troll you anyway so that that's brave stars right so they're also based in hanoi uh the interesting thing here is right like uh so this is brave stars website right so you see the way it's set up right uh very nice and then, there's this kind of stuff, like,

I don't understand, like,

there's so much stuff from the outside, like, I don't understand

in Vietnam, and this is one of them. So this is

Bravestar's website. 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.

So it's like you scroll down, and then, like, there's a white. Wait in here.
Scroll up. Scroll up.
Stop. Go down.
Go down. Go to the S part.
Down. Down.
Down. Stop.
What do you see? Space survival. Oh, yeah.
Something sus is going on There we go What are you talking about? So basically like Among Us clone Okay These websites look super similar to me So like I don't know like if it's the Chinese way Like it's just like everything And it's just one template. Like why would you even care about this too much?

I mean, even if you care about it too much,

it's just, oh, wait, these guys are doing it.

Yeah, no one cares, right?

Yeah, no one cares.

Yeah, no one cares.

I'm pretty sure we are the only people

looking at the websites.

Like these days, like nobody cares.

I mean, people care, of course.

Nobody cares as long as you don't have website integration for your game and webshop interface there. That's when they should care.
Well, Jakob doesn't have a website. There you go.
Not even his own work mail. So there you go.
I bought him his domain and made it in the work mail. never uses it yeah of course because it goes to spam immediately what a surprise anyway okay yeah what's what anyway look at these numbers for x game studios right like 1 billion downloads 300 3 million mao 100 more than 100 staff and it's just like no one in the west knows these studios at all no they're absolutely massive.
We talked, I think when this airs,

the staff and it's just like no one in the west knows these studios at all no 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 people just don't care about the asia in in a sense that in a sense that like they are so far ahead of a lot of other people, they don't care about Forex. And people don't care about Vietnam because they don't know IA.
Don't follow. Don't follow, yeah, exactly.
Don't follow what's happening. It's crazy.
It's really crazy. It's exactly like the same thing with South Korea and Lucky Defense game.
Until we talked about it, nobody even knew about the game, except Chinese. Except the whole China, which already cloned it.
Yeah, exactly. 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.
Where did I hear his name? Anti-Stress Relaxing Toy Game. Jim W.
Mr. Jim W.
He had this Anti-Stress stuff, which was one of his top games they had a motor racing game as well 2.4 million downloads yeah here it is oh don't even go there come on it's impossible to find that gameplay because everything goes to probably the more random game or maybe I found it yeah found it baby games no it's not baby games okay it's x games oh no this is not good x game studio yeah anyway it's just yeah it's come on racing it looks exactly like car race by i came but it's with motorbikes yeah so basically very simplistic hybrids that are

it's not even hybrids it's not even hybrid this is ad monetized like 100 or 95 it's still a little bit deeper than hyper casual so between hybrid than hyper casual okay what do you call that then the casual no Basically

hybrid-ish

more robot hypercasual

hybrid-ish

no no we need to come up with a term for this this is how things are done in the gaming industry you come up with a term and then everybody's like ah this is a great so we need to come up with this anyway super casual we don't have to come up with it now, but we can take some suggestions. Yeah, yeah.
And then we have probably one that confuses me the most, right? This is ABI 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. And Perfect Tidy, which we've covered on the podcast a couple of times they have the game i can't say someone else would say it because i can't say it so someone else say it that's your nemesis satisdom no satisdom no satisdom but satis as satisfaction satisdom okay thank you orange man i really appreciate it 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 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 sort a toolbox and that's level 39 and then you can watch if you don't know what you're doing you can watch some rewarded video for a hint and then you see interstitials between every level but it's like silly stupid things like this is 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 yeah like i'll show you perfect timing it's satisfying it's really really satisfying and you don't really need to think too much i mean you kind of you need to solve these short puzzles but just 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 play.
Yeah, just you want to have 60 to 90 second experience in the game as a level. They have that as 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 I totally get that. And it's like, yeah, it works well in the US.
Extremely well. Yeah, but look at these downloads.
Like, it's just, 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, it's like in the days.
Short retention. Do I get it right that what we are looking at is basically more robust hyper-casuals, like let's call them super-casuals, that are mainly...
Ultra-casuals. That are mainly driven by US traffic ECPMs from revenue side perspective and aiming there.

And then whatever traffic they can add on top of it.

But it's still mainly U.S. needs to be the first.

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

It's massive.

It's big.

Yeah, it's big.

And I'm pretty sure these games have very low CPIs of how it looks like and what it actually does. Because it's kind of like, you know, you see and you know what you're going to get immediately.
And they kind of expanded on this, right? Because Perfect Tidy, say the game, say it. Satisdom.
Yeah. And then Tricky Twist Puzzle.
they're kind of all the same right like they're just different they're tailored towards different like 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's it's just really me. But it works extremely well, right? Woodenuts and bolts and puzzle.
Yeah, they all have one. All these studios in Vietnam have one of these wood nuts puzzles.
I'm actually saving it for last. So they also have a bus escape traffic jam.
Of course. Yeah, of course.
I mean, it's a lot of, what can you say in a perfect way, a lot of cross-pollination happening between the Vietnamese studios. A lot of heavy inspiration, I'd say that way.
But that's the thing. I mean, I don't care.
You don't really need to reinvent the wheel. But the thing is, I mean, this is almost like Anatoly from Burning Games so they take what works and they just make it a little bit differently or they I'm pretty sure have you been on holiday reflecting, this is good but the UA trick is a strong part of it that's what I'm trying to figure out because this is not only the game design play.
These levels of downloads requires a lot of UA. US downloads.
And US downloads, exactly. Because ID is probably earning 200K a day at least, this title, right? This thing won't work without the US traffic at all.

It will, man.

No, no, no.

It will.

It will.

Because if this works and how it works in the US, you have very low CPIs.

Very, very low CPIs.

Imagine these very, very low CPIs in theory-free markets.

I'm thinking cents.

Yeah, I know.

But think also the eCPMs in those markets, which is also good. Yeah, but it's not as shit as you would seem.
You would even think. 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 would be higher than the CPI.
Yeah, but day 7 maximum, not more. I don't think like this working on day 30.
It doesn't matter. After day seven, it's there.
It's like you have until day seven. We keep shit users forever and they suddenly are cross-bulting.
No, no, no. Anyway, moving on to a studio that's a bit different, also based in Hanoi, is Ammonotes.
And they specialize in music games, right? So they have a... Did you say music? What? Did you say music? We already talked about the music album.
We released the music album. Yeah, we can ask if they can put it on Magic Tiles.
Oh, yeah. Oh, my God but this is their flagship title this is the one that's absolutely a yeah behemoth I'm actually working with the guy sending regards oh really? you take it over from here on this one you probably won't be better than me you also tell tell them to put Quest for Half Gamer in the fucking game.
It should be easy then, Jakob. It should be easy.
So if you go into the whole portfolio, just to see. And by the way, I don't know what happened with the sensor power thing, but we don't have a graph there anymore, unfortunately.
But they have this very specific... How do you call it? You have that.
There it is. Yeah, because you need to click on downloads.
Yeah. Okay.
Okay. Jesus.
So they have these very specific music rhythm games, similarly to the ones that you remember from the days where you would have the machines where you would be dancing on those, like pressing the... Yeah.
You know, the airs and stuff. Yeah.
Man. This can't be played on emulator.
This is the biggest learning I got from working on this. I cannot play this thing on emulator.
It's impossible. It's impossible.
Can you take your wife's phone? No, no, no. It's impossible because you can't feel the music.
No, no, you can't feel the music. I saw you dancing and you dance like a bear.
You need to use your finger because if you think about the buttons that you're pressing, just the thought of thinking makes you too slow to use your fingers. This is unplayable in emulator.
Felix can't play it either. Guys, we're from countries that are not really known for their sense of rhythm.
None of us are Brazilian. Have you ever heard a dance champion from Bratislava? Of course.
Of course, man. What are you talking about? Of course, yeah.
He's now a little bit more orange than usual. No, no, no, man.
But the thing is, they have very, very specific niche here for these rhythm-based games, and they do it super well. And it's all very good difficulty-based in a way that the song increases in speed.
It's a Guitar Hero. What are you talking about? It's a Guitar Hero.
It's basically a Guitar Hero version for mobile. And it's done very, very well.
And they're just doing very interesting things. 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... Is that you? Is that you? I can't really say more.
So this is when they hired Jakob. By the way, we talked about this and then we didn't mention Beatstar.

Yeah, Beatstar is the old new other one, right?

Like this is their real competition.

We are Vietnamese market, so.

I know.

But yeah, we were talking about Guitar Hero and then it's like, so it's almost like a

Guitar Hero.

Well, guess what?

But this is much, much sooner than Beatstar.

Yes.

Like some of their first games.

Of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of course.

Way okay.

Way okay. So they're in a battle to the death, huh? No, it's okay.
Anyway. There's not a lot of IIPs versus the ads in there.
Yeah. 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.

It's just one of these Vietnamese things.

Don't know why.

I would love to know why.

If you know why,

please message us in our Slack group and join us there.

The thing is, who cares?

We talked about this with First Fun

and River Game and all the others. There are so many entities.
It's just... It's a mishmish of entities.
It's just the Vietnamese way. Under Falcon Games, one of the other names is also Nam Ngo.
This is also part of Falcon Games. I don't know why, but I know this is part of Falcon Games.
Yeah, Cake Sorts is one of the biggest games, right? And you can see it's a nice little split on IAP and ad revenue. I think the good sorting game is better.
Yeah, the sorting game is better, but we've already covered it, so I didn't want to do it. We didn't, but we will.
Did we ever talk about the

stop the scroller shooters

on Abbey Portfolio?

No, we never talked about it.

No, we didn't talk about it.

No.

So many games in these studios

are like genius, right?

But here's Cakeswords.

Yeah, I know this gameplay.

Yeah, it's fine. I think it's creative.
Yeah, it's... It's fine.
I think it's sort of creative. Yeah, multiple times.
Yeah, so just saying the Galaxy Attack shooting game from is past 90 million revenue. Really? 90 or 90? 90 and 260 million downloads.

There you go.

Not so.

Easy.

Imagine this in Vietnam as well,

because what's the average income in Vietnam?

It's nuts.

These games must be one of the biggest growing industries.

It's insane.

It's insane.

It's insane. It's like...

But I really like the... would say approach to to work I guess I mean they work hard right? yeah they work super hard also I wanted to finish on this note because all studios in 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 puzzle game, a screw puzzle game and it's essentially a physics based puzzler where you're solving things by pulling out screws and you watch a lot of ads, that's what you do.
Can you give me the screen for a second? I can indeed. Show the scale of the thing that we're, I guess, missing because I guess we'll need to get to it at some point.
So this is Abbey Games' portfolio. Yeah.
And these are the numbers for the most downloaded game's. Air Force airplane games, Galaxy Attack, Space Shooter, Galaxy, Falcon, or in hundreds of millions of downloads, hundreds of millions of, tens of millions of IP revenue.
Just saying. yeah 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 Yeah. 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.
Yeah, but that's kind of in the past, right? Yeah, it's in the past, of course. 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 doubt, right? This is probably the hottest new country for mobile games, right? Wait a second, this is not past.
Check this out. All these games are making half a million a month IP.
Still. We'll get to it at some point.
We should cover all of them in one. We should do one of these next week.
We should definitely do that. All of them, because this is the rise of Vietnam.
The rise of Vietnam? Yeah. The only kind of problem with Vietnam these days, which is covering the news, is that they're becoming a China.
Is that the new Iceland thing about? Yeah. We have to talk about that as well, right? Because they're becoming a little China right there.
Yeah, so who wants to pick this up? You can do it. You can be so quiet there.
It's not really something that we know much about. It's just that it's been run over the news this week.
What are we talking about? We know everything about it. So you go, Mr.
Smartass. No, no, we don.
Meow. So basically what's happening is that there needs to be something similar to Chinese ESPN license.
So in order to run a game on, and I guess it only applies to App Store for now, not the Android. No, it's Google as well.
It's both. 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 in vietnam only and then if i understand it

excludes vietnamese companies for now so because they want to level the playing field for the

vietnamese companies because 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. Yeah, because the thing is what they say in a few of these articles, like for years unlicensed games distributed across app store by foreign entities have created unfair competition for domestic game publishers.
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? They're the top 10 percentile, man.
Like, these guys are so good. So they're doing quite well.
But this is the thing is, we're talking about Vietnam, not aboutese companies outside of vietnam that's 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 with uh which might be the issue here with uh the foreign entities versus the local developers is that like I'm seeing I work on a few games and we like Vietnam is top three or top four market and in terms of the IIPs so yeah it's it's not like who cares iOS or Android or both both both it's a hundred million people right like this massive it's huge it's like like It's not only about like, who cares about this? Because it's nothing. The biggest problem is like people were talking about this since November and December.
Everybody's like, ah, it's coming, but nobody gives a fuck. And now they enforce this like, oh my God, this is terrible.
It's like, yeah, well's like yeah well like come on don't cry you were you saw the news before and now everybody's like this is unfair for us blah blah blah well look 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 close to a global trade war, basically.
Like if you look at like what's slightly happening in the world, like Trump's slapping tariffs, like we literally said, 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 in every single country.

Yeah, look, it's like we are talking about this in different Slack groups and LinkedIn and everything.

And people from Vietnam and Asia basically said, look, these licensing regulations are, it's nothing new.

It's been here for many years and many publishers.

Nobody in force. Yeah, it's like it it's, 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.
Like it's just people saying it's not the end of the world. And, you know, there's always a workaround and always will be you just need to find a way how everybody else is doing it like the one in China where you get a nice kitty or whatever adventure game and suddenly it's a 4x with an update or you just rent an ISBN yeah exactly our nice's what I said.
Yeah, exactly. Our nice, happy, what is it? Like Hello Kitty Adventure suddenly became a 4X with a latest update.
Well, what can you do? So it's not the end of the world and obviously it's very fresh from the oven, all of these regulations, but still, don't cry me or anything. All right, let's end it there.

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, also.

Yeah, see you next time.

Yeah, see you next time.

Bye-bye.

Sending regards to Vietnam.

See you in a couple of months. Thank you very much.
you next time. Bye-bye.
Sending regards to Vietnam.

See you in a couple of months.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thank you.