GlassEgg, Vietnam’s number one games outsourcing company works with Microsoft, and EA

In Vietnam, if you talk about gaming, you’ll obviously know VNG, the biggest gaming company in the country. And of course, everyone knows Flappy Bird by now, the Gangnam Style of mobile games. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll likely know Divmob and ME Corp, but few people in the startup world here even know GlassEgg. And yet, this is a company that has been operating in Vietnam since 1997 and has been a part of producing major racing game titles like Forza Motorsport and works with Microsoft and EA.

UPDATE: _Tech In Asia_ has removed sensitive incorrect information from this article that was published earlier. We apologize for the misinformation.

But GlassEgg usually doesn’t produce its own games. It’s mainly a games outsourcing outfit, which explains why it isn’t so well known in the local gaming ecosystem. We sat down with CEO, Phil Tran, and general director, Steve Reid to learn more about the company.

The day the internet arrived

Tran says that he originally came to Vietnam in 1995, back when CD-ROMs were still prominent. At this time, he was contracting with a company called Studio MAX, which was interested in producing educational games for kids.

Back then, the first Toy Story had just come out and there was a steady craze around animated education on computers. What we did in the early days, was produce those games in Vietnam, and then physically bring the CDs back to the US every year. I traveled back and forth between the US and Vietnam monthly during those years.

But then, just around that time, the internet came. All of the education stuff was now available on the internet and the CD-ROM business was broken. Tran now had over 120 animators but no business ahead of him. So he did what any sensible entrepreneur would do.

In 1997, when the internet struck, I went out and bought a book on 3D. I learned everything in that book and I turned around and taught all of our young guys how to do it.

The journey into games outsourcing

In that first step in 1997, some of the older animators, engineers, and employees couldn’t handle the transition and they left. That left the some younger team members who were more flexible and eager to learn. With that, Tran slowly built up a team of 3D animators. But now they had a team without a contract. To Reid and Tran, this was a hard time, as Reid says, “the pioneer gets all the arrows in the back”.

Being the pioneers in games outsourcing “isn’t exactly a source of pride” for GlassEgg. But it was with a bit of luck and a lot of persistence that the team ended up at the E3 Gaming Convention in 1997. It was there that they got to meet companies like Nintendo. Reid says:

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