Sky Garden is VNG’s attempt to dominate mobile gaming in Vietnam

Two weeks ago, there was a little known game that topped the Vietnamese App Store. Sky Garden, or in Vietnamese, Khu Vuon Tren May, currently remains in the top 20. The game is listed in the App Store by a developer named Tuan Nguyen, but when you open up the app, a flashy logo appears with the title: Firebat Game Studio. Firebat Game Studio is one of the many studios that operates under VNG’s auspices. VNG is by far Vietnam’s biggest gaming company, with a valuation some have estimated to be nine figures.

The story of Sky Garden on the web

Sky Garden is arguably VNG’s most successful self-made game to date. It originally launched in early 2011. At its height, Sky Garden reached more than 10 million total downloads, with three million monthly active users and one million daily active users. The game even launched successfully in China, garnering awards for being among the most innovative web games. Of course, the game was lifted by VNG’s social media platform, Zing Me, which dominated Vietnam until 2012, when it was overtaken by Facebook.

Sky Garden, like VNG’s other web games, made money from users who bought scratchcards and inputted codes into the system. The scratchcards functioned as an in-app purchase delivery platform. This system is what allows VNG to continue to make millions of dollars today despite few people in the country spending money online.

(See: Le Hong Minh and his VNG story)

VNG has been repeatedly accused of only being successful because it shipped the wildly successful Vo Lam Truyen Ky, a Chinese game developed by Kingsoft. This game also used the scratchcard system. Sky Garden is thus a proud spot in VNG’s history, a game that VNG’s game studios produced. At the same time, opponents to VNG, who are so focused on its success with a Chinese game, have missed one of the keys to the company’s success: that it built out a massive distribution platform that cannot be matched by any company in the web space in Vietnam. We’ll look at that more later.

The social and game economics of Sky Garden for mobile

The first Sky Garden on the web had a host of features. But porting it to mobile means that the Firebat Game Studio parsed down its featurtes and re-thought its approach to the game. The format remains the same – a game where users can grow a pot of plants that are floating on clouds in the sky. But mobile has also allowed the team to look more deeply into social features like allowing users to buy and sell flowers and fruits to each other. When Tech in Asia asked if Sky Garden would allow users to attack each other, a la Clash Of Clans. Firebat’s Chaos Duc said:

The thing is, we would like to increase user engagement and what attacking other users does, especially with a garden, is discourages users from engaging. We don’t want to turn users off, we want to encourage them to play more and that’s where the buying and selling comes in. It encourages positive interaction.

The team says they don’t necessarily want to be the number one app in the Vietnamese App Store. In fact, they called the game’s huge success a fluke. Instead, they are focused on retaining a spot in the top 10 for years to come. The target is to have more than one million users – but the team didn’t reveal when they expect to achieve that number. The mobile release of Sky Garden didn’t hit the App Store until January 2014.

If you go to the App Store and try downloading Sky Garden, you’ll find that it is version 0.01.1603. According to an unnamed team member in the Firebat Game Studio, there will likely never be a 1.0 version.

VNG and its mobile app frontiers

Bonus: The many hidden studios at VNG