Flappy Bird creates a "boost" for Vietnam's application industry

Many Vietnamese technology experts say that the game Flappy Bird (dominating the iOS and Android download market share in January 2013) by author Nguyen Ha Dong is a bright spot in the Vietnamese application industry and this will be the "stimulator" for their development.

The free-to-play game is now generating $50,000 a day in advertising revenue, thanks to banner ads at the top and bottom of the screen.

(Source: Cnet.com)

Talking to reportersOn the morning of February 6, Mr. Ho Minh Duc, Deputy General Director of Naiscorp Company (the unit that developed the Socbay iMedia application with 22 million downloads and certified by Nokia as one of the four applications with the most downloads in Asia) commented that the author of Flappy Bird understands gamers very well.

Mr. Duc believes that before becoming famous, Flappy Bird already had a certain number of users, and thanks to that, Nguyen Ha Dong was able to learn about the needs of the players, thereby updating Flappy Bird to be more attractive.

Besides understanding gamers very well, Flappy Bird's success up to now also has factors of understanding the market and a little luck.

“Game making must inherently be mass-oriented and simple, and successful examples like Angry Bird, Candy Crush Saga… are typical examples,” Mr. Duc said.

Mr. Le Van Giap, founder of Vietandroid.com forum and also founder and operator of ViMarket.vn application store, said that technically, Flappy Bird is not difficult and an ordinary programmer can do it. However, the problem here is that Flappy Bird is a strange game, suitable for the psychology of players.

Regarding Flappy Bird's revenue of 50,000 USD/day, Mr. Nguyen Duy Hien, Admin of the Appstore.vn application store, commented that this is a very impressive number. According to his experience, Mr. Hien said that Vietnamese games with millions of downloads are currently only generating a revenue of a few thousand USD/month.

“In my opinion, Flappy Bird is a phenomenon in the Vietnamese gaming industry. It has a unique gameplay that encourages players to compete with each other’s scores. Before that, there were a few similar Vietnamese games, but they were not as good as Flappy Bird,” said Mr. Hien.

According to Mr. Giap, the figure of 50,000 USD/day was truly "shocking" because "up until now, no Vietnamese game has made so much money from advertising."

Mr. Ho Minh Duc said that a game that has reached the world level like Flappy Bird, the revenue of 50,000 USD/day is still quite modest compared to other famous games. And, this revenue can definitely increase in the near future.

According to Mr. Duc, revenue from advertising will not bring in as much money as combined with selling games (for example, Candy Crush Saga). Therefore, on the momentum of this success, author Nguyen Ha Dong needs to add more attractive scenarios to the game to meet user needs, thereby developing business scenarios such as attracting users to deposit money to play...

All three experts said that the success of Flappy Bird in terms of downloads and revenue up to now is the pride of the Vietnamese application industry. This will also be a stimulant for Vietnamese content businesses to invest more in developing applications and conquering users around the world./.

According to VNA