Vietnam’s mobile gaming industry is evolving beyond its hypercasual roots. In this edition of AdTech Leaders’ Insights, Maxon Pugovsky, a game industry expert with nearly a decade of experience in Vietnam, shares his perspective on how local studios are approaching UA and LiveOps, what international companies need to understand about entering the market, and what it will take for Vietnamese developers to build globally recognized IPs.
Vietnam-made games generated 4.9 billion downloads in 2025, ranking second globally, and Vietnamese developers produced more than 27,000 new games during the year. At the same time, studios are moving away from simply producing at scale toward quality and long-term value. Having worked in Vietnam since 2016, what has changed in the way Vietnamese studios think about building games? And what separates the studios that are likely to succeed in this next phase from those that may struggle?
Maxon Pugovsky: Vietnamese studios are bootstrapped. Operating without capital they had to focus on small-scale games with quick ROI - ad-powered games. Vietnamese game studios rose to prominence in the golden age of hypercasual. The successful studios had found their “secret sauce”: to balance an avalanche of ads with a user churn rate and achieve 100% ROAS not later than D7 or even D1/D0! Every studio wants to find their “secret sauce”.
Some studios had grown enormously and gained really good incentives (aka rebates) from ad networks like Google/Meta and others. They could do more experiments, spending less, and solidified their advantage over other studios. They became local publishers - smaller studios would bring their successful prototypes for publishing. The smaller studios would get a paycheck, but no access to data and no deep knowledge about LiveOps and product evolution - what works and why. On the contrary the publisher would use the knowledge to release a similar improved version of the game under their own label. That’s why Vietnamese studios in their lifecycle are building UA, LiveOps and data capabilities internally to be truly independent and own their learnings.
Vietnamese studios want to transition from huge download numbers to higher revenue-per-download. That means IAP-driven monetization, which requires more complex, deeper gameplay and metagame systems. Plus games in IAP-heavy genres wait for 100% ROAS much longer. So, studios need to invest both into longer production (and maybe even hire expensive foreign experts to fill expertise gaps) and into more UA cohorts. Bootstrapped studios don't have capital for such investments and risks. To make a transition studios would have to cooperate with institutional investors in the gaming sector. But not many Vietnamese founders are ready to concede even a fraction of their independence, and they tend to overvalue how much 10-20% of their studio could be worth.
“Vietnamese studios want to transition from huge download numbers to higher revenue-per-download.”
Maxon Pugovsky
You work with international companies that want to enter Vietnam through partnerships, local teams or market development. What does a successful Vietnam market-entry strategy actually look like in practice? Where do international companies most often make mistakes, and what should they understand about relationship-building, decision-making and local context before they start approaching Vietnamese studios?
Maxon Pugovsky: International companies in the games and apps sphere should think ahead about a multi-year strategy when deciding to enter the Vietnamese market. Start acquaintance by researching and visiting industry B2B events and getting to know key people in your niche. If the company makes a decision to start working in Vietnam, they need a person on the ground. First, to get intelligence and expertise about the market and business culture. Second, building relationships takes time - it could take quarters before you get the first deal. Third, you need a marketing strategy to build brand awareness. You should re-assure local companies that you are taking Vietnam seriously and an attractive partner for collaboration. Opening a legal entity in Vietnam would be the next milestone. And that’s a bit tricky process which requires research and preparation on its own.
For example, Point2Web, a performance-oriented marketing partner that helps advertisers acquire and engage audiences across leading ad platforms, built a dedicated team on the ground to work with Vietnamese studios, and I joined as Growth & Partnerships Lead. Having a local team means we can talk to founders and decision-makers in their own language and build relationships the way they are built here: in person and over time.
I think the main mistake international companies are making is episodic and short-term activity - they make a splash, don’t see the deals flowing, and stop. You should approach Vietnam with a mid/long-term plan for 1-3 years for start.
Vietnam-made games account for 10.93% of global downloads in Simulation, Puzzle and Arcade, making Vietnam a global leader in these genres. But we're also seeing studios move toward Hybrid-casual, Puzzle and deeper products with longer lifecycles. Given your background in production and LiveOps, where do you think Vietnamese studios have the biggest opportunity to move up the value chain? Is it about better product design, stronger LiveOps, monetization, IP, or something else?
Maxon Pugovsky: Vietnamese studios are very good at “industrialization” of production systems. So, I see that a robust LiveOps cycle and systems could be a natural strength for local studios. And leading game companies in Vietnam are already strong in LiveOps. I would say that mini-games and gameplay diversity of LiveOps events could be improved further.
However, to move even higher on the value chain Vietnamese studios still have to improve both product design and monetization. It would be awesome to see strong original IPs coming from Vietnam, but for now we see game names tailored to ASO and gameplays iterating top ranking hits.
Moving up the value chain also changes how you acquire players. As studios build deeper games, they need to understand which audiences stay and spend to justify increasing acquisition cost. This is where the right UA partner makes a difference. At Point2Web, we work with studios on media planning, creative testing and hands-on UA, testing additional channels against clear ROAS targets.
Around 80-90% of Vietnamese studios surveyed work with publishers, while 30-40% have adopted some form of hybrid model combining publishing partnerships with self-publishing. We also see a tension between rapid growth and product control, with studios increasingly looking for partners that can provide not just funding but operational expertise and market data. From the partnerships you've worked on, what should a Vietnamese studio actually look for in an international partner? And conversely, what do international publishers often misunderstand when trying to work with Vietnamese teams?
Maxon Pugovsky: Partnerships could be very different depending on the segment - a collaboration of a game studio with a service provider would be very different from work with a publisher or investor. Co-development and outsourcing is a different dimension also. So, it's hard to give general advice. What Vietnamese studios are looking for in partners: genuinely equal relationships, when partners are interested in win-win collaboration and fair sharing of upside, and don't try to exploit in-experienced and less savvy local studios, or merely extract value from a relatively cheap production hub.
A useful partner should fill a specific gap. A studio might already have a strong internal UA team but needs help testing an unfamiliar channel or producing more creative variations. Point2Web can support that with platform access, campaign execution and creative production. I would start with one game, an agreed test budget and clear success criteria, with reporting that helps the studio understand what worked and why.
International partners should understand that Vietnamese game studios are not a homogenous entity - the studios are very different. Some are emerging and making the first steps, some are monsters of production and LiveOps, in a good sense of the word. Some studios are lacking product and design vision - they copy hit games on the market or work-for-hire based on provided PRD/GDD. Others are adding innovative ideas. Many founders and top-managers don't speak English and don't engage with international partners unless they have a local bizdev manager. Some founders would consider external funding, others would rather bootstrap their path to success forever. So, international companies should segment game studios in Vietnam and understand with what segments they would like to engage and how exactly.
There's an interesting contrast in Vietnam's domestic market. Vietnamese users account for just 5.53% of downloads of Vietnam-made games, but generate around $64 million in IAP revenue, representing 13.08% of total IAP revenue. What does that gap tell us about the Vietnamese player and the domestic opportunity? And do you think international publishers tend to underestimate Vietnam as a consumer market because they focus too heavily on its role as a development and export hub?
Maxon Pugovsky: For sure, the Vietnamese domestic market is overlooked and underestimated by international game publishers. 102M people live here, and almost 60M of them are playing games. Just 15% of revenue from mobile paying players in Vietnam is coming through App Store and Google Play payments, while 85% of revenue is collected though local D2C payments (Source: Digital in Asia). To unlock the full monetization potential of the Vietnamese market, international game companies need to partner with local publishing partners, who can enable local payments. The local games market is heavily regulated, like in China, and receiving a license for a game with IAPs is possible only in partnership with a local company.
Chinese, Korean and Japanese game developers already understand the value of the Vietnamese market and actively collaborate with local publishers. But there are very few Western mobile games with local payments and LiveOps for Vietnamese players.
Looking ahead three to five years, what do you think Vietnam's next chapter in mobile gaming will look like? Do you expect the country to remain primarily an export and production powerhouse, or could we see more Vietnamese companies building globally recognized IP, attracting strategic investment, and becoming major publishers in their own right? And what would need to happen for that next stage to materialize?
Maxon Pugovsky: I have a very positive outlook for the Vietnamese gamedev industry for the next 5 years. Everything that you named will be happening. Outsourcing studios will grow their expertise and move into more complex co-dev projects, otherwise they would lose ground to studios from cheaper territories. Salaries in Vietnam continue growing year-over-year, as well as capabilities of the local IT workforce. Vietnam will complete the current transition from “cheap” into “expert” category in outsourcing.
I truly hope that there will be new home-grown IPs like the iconic Flappy Bird, which would be better equipped to translate popularity into commercial success. Almost a year has passed since NCSoft acquired a controlling stake in Lihuhu Games. For sure the market is ripe for the next acquisition or a major strategic investment.
The best outcome for the ecosystem will be when numerous employees of a successfully acquired studio would get a sizable paycheck for their equity shares, and start investing in new studios. But that requires a new approach in hiring and retention of the early and key employees - sharing equity with them. The current legislative environment in Vietnam is not optimized for vesting stock options in startups and requires adjustment for such scenarios.
