A builder’s perspective from inside the ecosystem

A young industry shaped by platforms, not institutions

Vietnam’s mobile game industry is young-not just in age, but in how it was formed.

When Apple’s App Store launched in 2008, followed by Google Play in 2012, Vietnam suddenly had access to global distribution. What we didn’t have was capital infrastructure, policy support, or institutional backing. The moment that put Vietnam on the global map - Flappy Bird around 2013–2014 was less the start of an industry and more a signal that something had already been quietly taking shape.

That timeline matters more than we often admit.

Most Vietnamese mobile game studios today are under 15 years old. Even the most established companies usually have only 12 or 13 years of operating history. Very few studios have lived through more than one full boom-and-bust cycle of the global mobile games market. As a result, many founders have learned the business in an environment where speed and survival mattered more than long-term optionality.

This didn’t just shape products. It shaped how people thought about risk, capital, and growth.

Bootstrapping as the default, not the exception

In Vietnam, bootstrapping was never a philosophy. It was simply how things worked.

Historically, around 90–95% of game studios self-funded their early stages. Founders relied on personal savings, outsourcing revenue, or cash flow from previous projects. Even today, studios that have raised venture capital likely make up only 1–2% of the market.

While Vietnam now has several hundred mobile game studios, the early ecosystem consisted of only a few dozen teams. Many founders came from outsourcing backgrounds or early anchor companies like Gameloft and VNG. Capital markets for games didn’t exist. Government support didn’t exist either-and largely still doesn’t.

That absence of capital didn’t just slow growth. It fundamentally shaped how studios chose what to build.

The hypercasual era and capital-light growth

For a long time, Vietnam’s mobile output was heavily concentrated in hypercasual and optimization-driven games. At its peak, as much as 90% of released titles followed hypercasual or clone-based models. Original IPs, hybrid casual, and mid-core games likely accounted for less than 10%.

From the outside, it’s easy to criticize Vietnamese studios for cloning. From the inside, cloning was often the only rational response to zero capital, zero safety net, and zero second chances.

This phase rewarded execution speed above all else. Games could be prototyped and launched in one to three weeks. Some teams shipped a new title every week. UA testing was cheap. Many products reached profitability on D0, D1, or D3. With teams of just two or three people, studios could build viable businesses without meaningful upfront capital.

Vietnam didn’t choose hypercasual.
Hypercasual chose Vietnam-because the capital was absent.

In hindsight, this wasn’t about creative preference. It was financial logic. When capital is scarce and cycles are short, simplicity wins.

When CPI rises, business models break

That environment no longer exists.

As global competition intensified, hypercasual CPI rose sharply-by 150% or more in many markets, sometimes nearly doubling. UA stopped being a lightweight experiment. Validating a product now often takes 30, 60, 90, or even 180 days before reaching payback.

Prototype timelines expanded too. What once took a week now takes three or four weeks just to reach a minimal testable version. UA spend grew exponentially, turning early-stage iteration into a capital-intensive process rather than a capital-light one.

The implication is simple, but profound: capital can no longer be short-term.

Publisher dependency and constrained optionality

As UA costs rose, publisher dependency deepened.

Many studios now rely on publishers for UA funding and distribution, usually under revenue-sharing models where developers receive around 30–50% of net profit. These partnerships enable scale-but they also shift control.

Publishers often decide whether a game scales or gets dropped. Once dropped, most studios lack the capital or infrastructure to relaunch or operate the game independently. In practice, this creates a form of structural dependency that limits long-term optionality-even for technically strong teams.

Publisher dependency is not really a business model choice.
It’s a capital constraint disguised as strategy.

And it raises a difficult question: once a studio fully depends on publishers, can it ever regain optionality?

Complexity is no longer optional

At the same time, product complexity across the global mobile market has increased. Hybrid casual and mid-core games are no longer optional upgrades. They are becoming the baseline for sustainable growth.

Team structures reflect this shift. In the past, two or three developers could build and scale a hypercasual game. Today, that size is often only enough for early prototyping. Once a product enters production, hybrid casual teams typically grow to four, eight, or even ten people, each with distinct skill sets.

For mid-core games, the numbers climb further. Teams of 20, 30, or even 40+ are increasingly required to support content pipelines, live operations, and long-term retention.

Development cycles mirror this complexity. Hypercasual games once launched in weeks. Hybrid casual games now take one to six months to reach market readiness. Mid-core titles often require six to twenty-four months. Longer cycles mean higher burn, greater risk, and a much stronger need for capital that is aligned with reality.

New capital instruments, still early-stage

Vietnam’s gaming ecosystem is starting to experiment with new financial instruments.

UA funding structures are emerging, though access remains limited. Studios typically need three to six months of validated performance history-especially retention-before qualifying. Game acquisition has also appeared as a potential path, with a small number of notable deals, such as Bus Frenzy from Vigafun.

Still, the M&A market remains thin and selective. Large-scale or frequent acquisitions are rare, partly because games need to demonstrate long-term stability before they become attractive assets.

More importantly, this is the first time Vietnam has seen early-stage investors, venture builders, and ecosystem-focused capital players actively engaging with game studios. It’s a meaningful shift away from a purely self-funded past-but the system is still forming.

The missing layer: institutional and government support

Compared to other emerging game markets, Vietnam’s lack of institutional capital support stands out.

Turkey offers a useful contrast. There, government-backed programs provide UA support, platform cost subsidies, salary incentives, and favorable tax policies. These mechanisms help studios survive longer cycles and take more creative risks.

In Vietnam, despite the industry’s ability to generate jobs, exports, and digital revenue, structured government support for game development capital remains absent. This gap increases reliance on private capital and slows ecosystem-level maturation.

From builders to ecosystem builders

Vietnam’s mobile game industry is no longer constrained by talent or execution capability. That phase is over.

The constraint has moved upward-to capital structure, risk-sharing mechanisms, and ecosystem maturity.

Founders are beginning to think beyond bootstrapping. Studios are learning to align capital strategy with production complexity and market ambition. Publishers, private investors, and venture builders are starting to form the connective tissue of a more resilient ecosystem.

Bootstrapping will likely remain the most effective path from zero to one.
But from one to ten-and beyond-it is no longer sufficient.

What Vietnam is building now is not just games, but shared financial understanding across the ecosystem. The real question is no longer whether Vietnam can build bigger games-it already can. The question is whether it can build capital structures that survive them.

Disclaimer: The figures and perspectives shared in this article are based on industry experience, aggregated market observations, and publicly available information. They are intended to illustrate ecosystem-level patterns rather than serve as precise market measurements.