Vietnam’s Rise Is the most inspiring story in Gaming by Felix Braberg

About 2.7 in February, and now you can see how essentially this has just absolutely exploded to about 15 million dollars per month in IAP revenue, which majority comes from one game, which is Scroodom, which we have done a review of on the Two and a Half Gamers podcast, which you can just look up and I can leave it down here in the show notes as well if you're keen.

But the majority of the IAP revenue comes from this game.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another fantastic episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast.

Today, it's just me and me alone.

So, you know, the episode is going to be extra, extra good just because of that.

that.

And what I wanted to talk about really quickly today, maybe just 10 or 15 minutes, I just want to talk again about Vietnam because I've been spending time in Censor Tower and we talk about it quite a lot on the podcast.

But I just wanted to share some data points that I've found here from Censor Tower just to truly kind of share with you guys the scale and why we talk about Vietnam so much.

So one of the first things that struck me is simply here, if we take a look at the top 25 publishers in the last,

you can see here that Azure Games topped the downloads list on Sensor Tower with 88 million downloads, nearly 89 million downloads.

Then you have MiniClip, which has been on an absolute tear, buying up studios all over the world.

But then right now, on the third position, on the third largest publishers by absolute downloads on Sensor Tower, we have Vietnamese Studio OneSoft, which is crazy that they're just behind MiniClip, right?

This studio essentially was, when I first looked at this in January this year, was not even on this list, right?

I think it's also a bit of grouping because there's a lot of companies in Vietnam that you don't really know about who is owned by who, but I think Sensor Tower has actually managed to do the mapping correctly now.

So you can truly see how big they are.

They're bigger than Outfit 7, right?

And the crazy thing is also that we have here down on the 12th position of the largest publishers, we have X Game Global with nearly 32 million downloads.

That's just behind Garena and Embracer.

So it's barely like, it's pretty much almost on the top 10, which is absolutely insane.

And then we have another friend of the pod at.

place 20 with 23 million downloads, which is ICAME, a studio from Hanoi, which I've actually been to visit, which was very cool.

And they're actually only behind EA in terms of overall downloads, which is just a real testament to how Vietnam is actually becoming one of the global hotspots for mobile gaming.

But the data doesn't really stop there.

So if we take a look at the top Vietnamese publishers by absolute downloads, there's another thing that's crazy.

So I wrote a blog post or a newsletter post

back in February, and I was looking at the data from January of this year, right?

And at that time, the amount of studios in Vietnam that had at least over a million downloads per month was 44, which is a huge number of studios for any country, right?

But even just from Vietnam, that's massive.

If we look at the same data just five months later,

that number has grown from 44 up to 72 studios from Vietnam that are generating at least a million downloads per month.

You can see it right here.

Dreamcube Studio is the last studio, which is just insane.

That's a 64% jump in studios that are getting more than a million downloads per month in just less than five months.

So you can see what the absolute trajectory is here of all the games that are growing like crazy, right?

So new studios are flooding in.

So that means 58 new studios in Vietnam are getting over a million downloads in just five months.

But then also one of the cool things when I started digging into this was just like if we look at this one, right?

Fire holder Game Corp, right?

So what this tracks is the downloads from the last 30 days, which is 1.6 million for the studio.

And last month they had zero.

So what this means is essentially it's a new studio that's popped up in Vietnam that last month had zero downloads, and this month had 1.6 million downloads.

And the crazy thing here is that I went through and counted like all of the studios that had no prior downloads in the month of July compared to now to August.

And I went through all the pages and I managed to count that there's

58 new studios that have popped up in July alone in Vietnam, which is absolutely insane.

So, as you can see, there's a ton of new Vietnamese studios that are absolutely flooding in.

There's also a ton of studios that are having a lot of success that are coming from Vietnam.

And then, also, I wanted to highlight another thing that I thought was pretty cool to see.

So, looking at some of the main studios here, right?

So, we have here,

we have OneSoft, which in January was earning about $7.9 million per month in IAP revenue.

And then in the month of July, they've grown to $8.8 million in IAP revenue.

22% rise, which is not bad, right?

But it's not truly impressive to see these IAP numbers until you take a look at ICAM.

So this is iCAME's IAP revenue.

trending since January, right?

So you can see in January, they started at $2.9 million dollars in IAP revenue, and then you have about 2.7 in February.

And now you can see how essentially this has just absolutely exploded to about 15 million dollars per month in IAP revenue, which majority comes from one game, which is Scroodum, which we have done a review of on the Two and a Half Gamers podcast, which you can just look up.

And I can leave it down here in the show notes as well if you're keen.

But the majority of the IAP revenue comes from this game.

But that also means that essentially some of these studios in Vietnam that traditionally is known for ad monetization have basically started to move downstream to more complicated monetization methods and began to crack the more difficult IAP style of games.

So what does all this mean?

This means essentially that the Vietnamese studios are adapting, they're cracking the IAP nut, and also there's a ton of studios that are being formed and there's an absolute explosion of studios in Vietnam, which is essentially why we're talking so much about Vietnam.

And actually, Jakob and I are going to be in Vietnam for a games forum in the end of November.

I think it's the 28th of November, basically to meet some of these studios and talk about them more.

But I thought it was very, very valuable just to highlight this and actually showcase what's actually going on from a growth perspective.

from these studios and also to basically share some more knowledge on why we are so always talking about Vietnam.

So that's all I wanted to cover today, but we're going to keep an eye on all this space and share any information with you.

And hopefully, we get to meet some of these studios in Vietnam in November so we can talk to them and maybe have them come on the podcast, which would be really great.

Till next time, thank you so much for tuning in.