Vietnam’s game developers and publishers VNGGames, Amanotes, and Wolffun Game have levelled up with Google Cloud to establish the country as a global games industry powerhouse.

Google Cloud said in a statement on Wednesday that that the games companies are harnessing Google Cloud’s infrastructure, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to more effectively serve large audiences, unlock player and game insights, accelerate time to market, and revolutionize real-time player experiences.

It said the move is to enable Vietnam’s games businesses to reach a global audience and support the Ministry of Information and Communications’ goal of increasing the local games industry’s revenue from $600 million to $1 billion within five years.

“While consumers were starting to adopt smartphones en masse more than a decade ago, local game developers quickly became early pioneers in incorporating this trend into their business models,” said Toan Duc Nguyen, Country Manager, Vietnam, Google Cloud.

According to him, nearly half of the planet now plays games; the majority through their mobile device.

He said that the global games market is also set to generate more than $187 billion in revenue in 2023 – and this is more than five times higher than projected global movie ticket sales revenue in 2023, underscoring the massive international growth opportunity for games businesses.

“Vietnam’s mobile-first consumer economy and vast developer talent pool, combined with investments in full-fiber networks by telcos like FPT Corporation and games companies’ willingness to embrace new technologies to supercharge game production, could very well enable its games industry to leapfrog established games markets—which are better known for console and PC games—in exporting high-quality mobile games for the rest of the world,” he added.

According to the statement, game publisher VNGGames uses Google Cloud’s global edge network and web application firewalls — with technical implementation support from Cloud Ace — to serve its Gunny Origins and Dead Target mobile shooter games content as close to users as possible while defending against botnet attacks.

This enables VNGGames to reduce latency and load on its servers to cost-effectively reach millions of players, wherever they might be.

VNGGames has also been using Google Cloud’s scalable database management service to automatically organize and secure player profiles. This ensures they can pick up where they left off, every single time.

“The same infrastructure that is powering live services like Google Search and YouTube for billions of users is now enabling us to deliver live game experiences to players in multiple markets,” said Le Trong Giap, Head of Game Publishing Platform, VNGGames.

“We do not need to compromise between achieving performance, manageability, and scale, since Google Cloud services have effectively eliminated the need for manual infrastructure configurations,” he added.

Music games publisher Amanotes, on the other hand, has been using Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse and streaming analytics service to unite player and game data that was locked in silos, enabling staff to pull real-time insights from the data to enhance decision-making.

The firm views artificial intelligence (AI) as the next frontier in modern technology innovation and is actively haressing AI to reimagine game development and distribution.

The company invests significantly in machine learning systems, in collaboration with Google Cloud and Cloud Ace, to implement automation, thereby ensuring scalability and efficiency when serving billions of users.

“We utilized Google Cloud’s data analytics and AI services to create and maintain our products, with highly competent technical assistance from Google Cloud engineers and its implementation partners,

“Google Cloud’s AI-first approach and data science expertise have helped our games achieve over three billion downloads to date,” said Bill Vo, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Amanotes.

Development studio that specializes in player-versus-player games for mobile platforms Wolffun Game is also now using Agones, a dedicated game server orchestrator created by Google Cloud and Ubisoft, to support specific functions within Thetan Rivals, its latest online multiplayer party royale game. This includes the game’s Lobby feature for efficient player allocation.

The firm is also planning to use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Conversation to quickly build and test advanced chatbots.

These chatbots will be capable of having lifelike conversations with players of Thetan Rivals.

They will instantly generate customized versions of game items or character skins in response to simple, natural language prompts.

Wolffun Game then plans to go even further by integrating dynamic gen AI into a creative application called Thetan Creator, which will create entirely novel content in real-time, such as unique game characters, based on the demands of its players.

“The effort required to bring Thetan Rivals to life spanned over six months. This included a focus on creating and refining the game’s art style and environmental aesthetics,” said Nguyen Dinh Khanh, Chief Executive Officer, Wolffun Game.

According to him, Gen AI now enables the firm to expand the range of experiences its team can deliver and opens up new avenues for audience engagement and monetization, without adding to its team’s already intense workload.

“With AI enhancing human creativity to accelerate future game production, our goal for Thetan Rivals is to attract 100 million players worldwide and provide a customizable system for every player to freely express themselves through user-generated content,” he said.

Toan said that Gen AI will make the biggest impact on the games industry since the emergence of real-time 3D graphics and smartphones.

By staying at the forefront of technology adoption, he said the games industry can serve as a beacon of innovation for other businesses, showcasing new ways to inform, engage, and connect people at scale.

“At Google Cloud, we are dedicated to providing workload-optimized infrastructure, robust data analytics, and the most powerful and responsible AI capabilities to help advance Vietnam’s digital economy and establish the country as a global games industry powerhouse,” he added.

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