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Mark Barnes · · 8 min readAxie Infinity: A sign of Vietnam’s resurgence in the gaming sector?
In the game 7554: Glorious Memories Revived, people play as Vietnamese soldiers at the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
The first-person shooter game, one of the first made in Vietnam, was launched in 2011 to great fanfare. The Economist and the Wall Street Journal both wrote about it a few months after its release. Emobi Games (renamed Hiker Games in 2015), the developer of the title, was bestowed the People’s Choice Award by PC World Vietnam a year after its launch.
Years later – besides Flappy Bird’s success in 2014 – Vietnam’s gaming industry has yet to produce other global breakthroughs.
Image credit: Axie Infinity
That was until Axie Infinity entered the scene.
Developed by Ho Chi Minh-based startup Sky Mavis in 2018, Axie Infinity has taken the gaming world by storm. In its most recent round of funding, the game raised US$152 million at a reported valuation of US$3 billion from Andreessen Horowitz and others.
The title’s remarkable rise has been startling, raising the question of whether its success will be sustainable and if it will transform the country’s gaming sector.
See also: The hunt is still on for Vietnam’s next Flappy Bird
Overflowing with funding
Mike Tran, the CEO and founder of NFT-based crowdfunding platform Crowdhero, says there is a lot of buzz around NFT (non-fungible token) games and that it’s being fed by large sums of venture capital.
“For any game coming out, getting interest from investors is not that difficult,” he says. “You can raise 100,000 or 200,000 [dollars] easily.”
Crowdhero uses blockchain tech to allow content creators to reward their backers with NFTs that, if the project is successful, may be traded later.
According to Tran, this is a workaround for nascent projects that need a relatively small amount of pre-seed capital to get started.
The CEO doesn’t see the current wave of investment in NFT games as necessarily tied to either the promise of Vietnam’s game industry or Axie Infinity’s success.
Overcoming regulatory hurdles
Talent crunch
Industry needs societal acceptance
What lies ahead?
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Axie Infinity’s success shows what Vietnam’s game industry can do. But is it an anomaly or will it lead to a permanent boom for local developers?
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