Closing the 'downloads vs. dollars' gap
Welcome to The Ascent, your monthly inside look at Vietnam’s tech frontier from AVV. As experienced early investors in some of the country’s most iconic companies, we see shifts before they hit the headlines. Each issue distills what’s changing, why it matters, and where the next opportunities are.
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Let’s get into our focus for this edition: the major shift underway in Vietnam’s mobile gaming industry.
In the first half of 2025, Vietnam ranked second globally in mobile game downloads. Four Vietnamese publishers made the global top 20 by download volume. In 2024, Vietnamese studios generated 9.6 billion total downloads on Google Play and iOS combined, with the former putting Vietnam ahead of every other country, including China, by roughly 700 million downloads.
However, this reach hasn’t translated into world-class returns. Revenue from games released by Vietnamese studios hit roughly US$315 million in 2024, with 2025 projected to exceed US$430 million. Studios in the United States, China, Japan, and Turkey, on the other hand, generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Closing this “downloads vs. dollars” gap is now the goal for the entire ecosystem.
According to the Vietnam Gaming Outlook 2025 report, studios are actively trying to shift from IAA (in-app advertising) toward IAP (in-app purchases) by keeping their distribution advantage while adding the deeper game systems that make players want to pay.
The ad-only ceiling
For years, the strategy was simple: build a hyper-casual game in months, acquire users cheaply, monetize with ads, and repeat. Vietnamese studios such as Amanotes, Falcon Game Studio, and Bravestars Games followed this plan to billions of downloads.
Three factors have made this more difficult. First, user acquisition costs have climbed steeply in mature markets like the U.S., where the average cost per install is now over US$5 due to platform saturation and privacy changes.
Second, ad revenue per user has plateaued. In 2025, in-app advertising accounted for just 32.2% of global mobile game revenue, down from over 40% prior to 2020.
Third, studios that once recouped user acquisition costs within days now face payback windows stretching to weeks or months, far beyond what most small, self-funded teams can sustain.
Domestic studios going big
Vietnam’s gaming story has expanded well beyond anonymous hyper-casual factories, with smaller studios reaching significant milestones recently.
In 2025, NCSOFT acquired a 67% stake in Indygo Group, the Singaporean company that owned Vietnam’s Lihuhu. Since 2017, Lihuhu has released over 100 titles while generating 80% of its income from users in North America and Europe.
In January 2026, Hanoi-based mid-core studio Panthera Global raised a US$1.5 million seed round led by T-Accelerate Capital, a China-based gaming VC fund. This was one of the first examples of dedicated foreign gaming VC money leading a Vietnamese studio deal.
Ho Chi Minh City’s Amanotes and Hanoi’s Falcon Game Studio have also seen success, respectively amassing billions of downloads and becoming the first Vietnamese firm to produce a game generating US$1 million in in-app revenue. iKame, also from Hanoi, was among the top 15 mobile game publishers in the world at one point last year, while Athena has developed dozens of games and is among the top 50 mobile puzzle and board games in the U.S.
These mid-size studios hope to better monetize on a longer timeline through in-game additions such as live operations, battle passes, gacha systems, and reputational systems that generate revenue.
There are also regional dynamics within Vietnam to watch. One domestic game industry insider recently estimated that 90% of active game development studios are located in Hanoi, though there is no comprehensive source of info for this.
Of course, Vietnamese game studios can’t be discussed without mentioning Sky Mavis (an AVV portfolio company) and its Axie Infinity, which raised a US$152 million Series B led by a16z at a reported ~US$3 billion valuation as the game approached two million daily active users. They also serve as a harsh reminder of the operational risks that come with global success: After the Ronin Bridge hack, Sky Mavis raised another US$150 million led by Binance to reimburse affected users.
New capital and playbooks
Historically, many of Vietnam’s top mobile studios didn’t look like classic VC deals. Hyper-casual publishers could prototype quickly, monetize with ads, and recycle cash without outside investors. But as user acquisition slowed and ad economics weakened, studios needed new business models, more capital and data infrastructure, and long-term monetization discipline.
Panthera Global’s previously mentioned fundraising round is an example of this, and more can be expected. In the past, gaining the trust of studio founders was a challenge as competition was brutal and copycats were frequent. In our recent experience, founders are becoming less cagey and more open to potential investment.
Why Vietnam is winning now
Vietnam’s ongoing rise comes down to structural advantages and rapid adaptation.
Mobile-first distribution is the obvious one, as smartphones dominate Vietnam’s ecosystem. This means local teams build natively on the same platform that powers global app stores. The second advantage is experimentation capacity: with hundreds of active studios, the country has an enormous base rate for testing and iteration.
Third, Vietnam is aligning with the global shift to “hybrid-casual,” or games that combine the easy-to-learn core loop of a casual title with deeper meta systems like character progression, live events, and in-app purchase layers.
Finally, economics forced discipline. Most Vietnamese studios never raised capital and prioritized profitability. Being frugal and an eagerness to adopt AI will give these studios more chances to optimize their retention and monetization strategies. Studios that survive this transition will emerge with more predictable revenue and higher margins.
Friction points and what to watch next
While there’s no doubt that Vietnam’s gaming boom is real, there are real obstacles in the way of further growth.
Long-term monetization remains the core strategic challenge. Vietnam can generate reach, but the real test is whether more studios can produce mid-core titles with longer lifetime value and repeatable monetization at a global scale. The shift to IAP is also demanding new roles that didn’t exist in ad-driven studios, such as economy and progression designers, data analysts, and live-operations specialists.
There is also the structural issue of platform dependence. Even mature studios are at the whim of Apple and Google policy shifts, App Store review changes, and the pricing swings of global ads. Smart gaming studios will try to maximize their revenue through web stores to avoid the platform tax.
Vietnam’s gaming ecosystem also awaits its defining exit moment. For example, Turkey’s gaming scene accelerated dramatically after Zynga acquired Peak Games for US$1.8 billion in 2020. NCSOFT’s acquisition of Indygo Group is a promising signal, but the community-galvanizing billion-dollar exit hasn’t happened yet.
Still, the direction is unmistakable, and Vietnam is building the monetization engine on top of its existing distribution prowess. We may look back on 2026 as the point where Vietnamese game studios showed the world they can scale and generate long-term revenue at a global level.
See you next month.
The AVV team
