VNG, VTC and FPT Online, the three biggest names on the online game market may be dislodged from their positions since a series of small distributors have appeared and reaped fruits.

New emerging names

SGame, SSGroup, Vivoo, CMN Game have joined the market for the last few years. However, the period has been long enough for them to cement their positions on the market after launching a lot of attractive games. 

The common characteristic of the companies is that they have small scale, but they have very qualified games programmers. They are mostly from the leading games companies such as VNG, FPT Online or VTC Games and they now make the games to compete with the companies what they once worked for.

The qualified programmers include very well-known names and the once members of the founding council of the big companies. The talented persons have also been successful with their own business.

SGame, for example, a small company with the modest number of games distributed every year, can obtain the annual turnover of up to hundreds of billions of dong. The two co-founders Nguyen Anh Dung and Nguyen Manh Linh are believed to deserve credit for bringing success to the company.

Nguyen Anh Dung, who played a very important role in bringing CrossFIre and Audition to Vietnam, was a high ranking executive of VTC Game. Meanwhile, Linh, also a former officer of VTC Game, has successfully developed Linh Vuong webgame into the No. 1 game in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the name Le Huu Thanh (nickname Teddy Thanh), which has been associated with the success of Tam Quoc Truyen Ky game, was an officer of FPT Online.

Besides SGame, another small company has also been succeeding in its business – SSGroup. Though this is a newly set up group, it is really a big influence on the market when it links small companies to create a system of game makers. The head of the company is a well-known name – Le Hoang Son, one of the founding members of VNG.

Vivoo, CMG Game and SunSoft have also been very successful in the market. The heads of the companies are all the well-known names in the fields of digital content and online games, such as FPT Online’s former CEO Luong Cong HIeu, former Deputy Director of FPT Online Pham Quoc Thang, and VTCzOne’s Public Relations Director Le Thanh Minh.

New names are the big threat to famous names

The appearance of small games companies on the market has been shaking the tripodal position on the market which has been held by VNG, VTC Game and FPT Online for the last many years. Analysts have also anticipated a new stiff competition in the online game market in the time to come.

The lack of the management mechanism for a long time has led to the fact that no MMOPRG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) has appeared recently in the domestic market. However, this has generated a new type of games – webgame.

Webgames have appeared continuously on the market since late 2011, accounting for 90 percent of the 20 games marketed in the last eight months.

While small companies have been distributing webgames which have a lot of advantages and can bring profits just after a short time, big companies’ business has been slowing down, since old MMOPR games can no more attract gamers, while there has been no new MMOPR game available on the market.

Source: Buu Dien/ VNN