Early in 2014, the whole world was thrilled with revenues of over VND1 billion daily of the mobile game Flappy Bird (developed by young programmer Nguyen Ha Dong). Immediately, Vietnam technology community drew a pink picture of domestic software that may successfully enter international market. However, there is still high doubt, especially Vietnam software industry is in its early stage and the Flappy Bird phenomenon was “extinguished” several days after.
Good software available
After Flappy Bird was taken down from AppStore, domestic media has analysed the issue in detail. Success of Flappy Bird and Nguyen Ha Dong is not as natural as it may seem. Understanding users’ demand and a little good luck will probably raise a simple game to the top level with big revenues from advertising. Besides Flappy Bird, for the last several years, Vietnam has other mobile softwares highly appreciated by the international technology community.
The first one is Over – the – top (OTT) Zalo of VNG. Launched in August 2012, the product was comprehensively improved to be more suitable for Vietnamese by the end of 2012. Thanks to this step, Zalo is chosen as one of the most creative mobile applications of Asia. By May 2013, Zalo attracted 2 million users with natural dissemination like Facebook’s.
By now, Zalo has had over seven million users with the largest amount of messages daily in Vietnam. Although it is a free application, its producers still receive revenues from advertisement. In early 2012, Nguyen Long – last year student of Ho Chi Minh University of Science and Technology – provided BlackBerry users an application called SayIt. It was a valuable improvement for the capacity of searching by voice and then was considered a first class technology.
Immediately after being launched, SayIt reached first place on AppWorld, achieving revenues of over VND400 million. Most recently, School Cheater developed by Buoi Studiom, a Vietnamese game producer, has been chosen as one of 11 most interesting games in the Game Development World Championship 2013.
Mr Vu Hai, a mobile application development freelancer in Ho Chi Minh City confirmed that although established about 5 years ago, the number of the local mobile application development community has now reached thousands of programmers. Most of them write mobile applications themselves and upload them to application stores for sales. Each download will bring them about US$1 – 2. These people can gain hundreds of USD monthly if their applications are good.
Public support needed
Also according to Mr Vu Hai, with a young software industry, phenomena like Flappy Bird, Zalo or SayIt is very important. It not only creates business ideas for young technology fans, but also changes the way the world looks at Vietnamese software market. However, the market still reveals many negative points.
With creative programmers, Vietnam is chosen as one of most attractive software processing countries in Asia, is a partner of many developed countries like Japan, South Korea, the US, the EU. However, processing is related to only part of the product. Therefore, while direct revenues from Vietnam game market reached VND6,000 billion, the contribution of domestic games was modestly about 10 – 15 percent. Many imported games to Vietnam have part of them developed by Vietnamese people.
Director of a game company in Quang Trung Software Park assessed that application stores like AppStore, CHPlay have many Vietnamese softwares and programmes. The point is these applications are not very creative. Vietnamese applications concentrate too much on entertainment (bikini watching, fortune - telling) but forget about life supporting issues.
Especially, the director confirmed that public opinions and management thinking should be changed. As in the case of Flappy Bird, its game writer suffered many pressures when the public accused him of “borrowing” ideas of many people, from many places; of using “tricks” to settle rating place or General Department of Taxation intended to “have their eyes” on its revenues.
Consequently, the game writer had to say for himself: “The media has overestimated the game. I did not expect it. Please give me peace of mind”. If there had been a better policy, Flappy Bird would have been an asset for the country!
According to ABI Research’s forecast, revenues from mobile applications worldwide will reach US$46 billion in 2016, up US$8.5 billion over 2011. It is forecast that mobile applications and game market in Vietnam will also boom with the dramatic development of nearly 10 million smart – phones and 20 million 3G-accounts.
Therefore, software companies assessed that only when applications and games are considered a real industry with appropriate policies, will Vietnamese programmers feel secure to create and do business by their own intellectual products.
T.A
Vietnamese
