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Thu Huong Le · · 8 min readThe pitfalls of Vietnam’s GameFi sensation
At a forum held in Ho Chi Minh City recently, Truong Gia Binh, the co-founder and chairman of FPT Corporation, said Vietnam should be proud of producing talent like Flappy Bird creator Nguyen Ha Dong and Axie Infinity developer Nguyen Thanh Trung.
“We have the strong foundations to create high-value startups,” said Truong, who co-founded FPT in 1988 and has been pivotal in transforming it into Vietnam’s largest IT conglomerate.
He’s right to put the two developers on the same pedestal. Seven years ago, Flappy Bird’s global success catapulted Vietnamese indie game developer Ha Dong to unprecedented fame and scrutiny. But unlike the short-lived Flappy Bird, Axie Infinity’s success seems to be more sustainable, at least for now.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
The NFT game, despite suffering from a US$620 million crypto hack in late March, has achieved an unimaginable feat. It has become one of the most in-demand blockchain games in the world.
Thanh Trung and his team have transformed Sky Mavis, the startup behind Axie Infinity, into a tech unicorn within just three years. Such global success has turned Vietnam into a hotbed for GameFi (aka play-to-earn games).
See also: Is Axie Infinity too big to fail?
In 2020, we analyzed the country’s lack of growth-stage startups, and last year, we wrote about why it hasn’t produced a lot of tech companies-turned-IPO hopefuls. Unlike consumer tech, where local companies lose out to foreign competitors like Grab or Sea Group, Vietnamese startups seem to have a head start with GameFi – and potentially blockchain.
Will this GameFi sensation propel the country’s rather immature tech ecosystem to new heights? Or will the recent crypto crash devastate the country’s burgeoning crypto gaming startups?
Talent shift
“I have lost two junior developers to crypto startups,” says a veteran Ho Chi Minh City-based chief technology officer. “I’m OK that they left, but it hurts nevertheless.”
This has been the overall sentiment in the local market lately. Some industry experts say it has been “more challenging than ever” to hire quality developers in the country even before the explosion of crypto and GameFi projects.
An IT market report by TopDev estimates that Vietnam needed 450,000 IT workers in 2021, but the total number of developers that worked in the country as of Q1 that year was 430,000, leaving about 20,000 developer positions unfilled.
A major factor was the spike in demand for talent from remote tech positions as well as blockchain and GameFi projects, according to Toan Nguyen, CEO and co-founder of HR tech platform Recruitery.
Having high salaries and liquid tokens are appealing compared to non-liquid ESOP.
The FOMO effect
Going global from day one
A wake up call?
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Vietnam is a hotbed for GameFi, but there’s a flip side to it.
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