Playing the Game Douglas Pyper meets the creators of 7554, Vietnam’s first offline computer game. With online gaming all the rage, are they on a fool’s errand? Photo by Justin Mott
T
his isn’t what you’d expect. There’s no brightly coloured Google HQ furniture. The walls aren’t decorated with posters of babes. There are no goatees, no faded cult t-shirts and nobody has called me a “noob” or said anything to make me feel small and out of place. Where are all the orcs? You’ll have to excuse them, this is Vietnam’s first and only offline games publisher and they’ve only been around since 2009. Perhaps that’s not enough time to start judging people in binary numbers. The Hanoi office of Emobi Games looks just like any other office in the capital. In fact, the most remarkable thing I can see is the improbably massive selection of shoes discarded by the door. But in this office, an entire floor of workers is doing something that nobody in Vietnam
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has ever done before — programming and publishing an offline game. Business-wise, it’s a counterintuitive move. Most software companies are moving into online games, and particularly in a market like Vietnam, where practically all games are pirated, this makes perfect sense. Free social media games like Farmville are massively popular and are cheap and easy to make. Yet the online games industry isn’t without its risks. Vietnam is presently refusing to license any new online games as it tries to work out how it feels about them. They seem to be a cause of social evils, like skipping school, staying up late, and possibly addiction. That means that all the newly emerging software companies, which may perhaps be a measure of Vietnam’s increasingly high quality labour force, have
to sell their products to foreign publishers in Japan, China and the US. The net result, according to one newspaper report, is that two thirds of the revenue from the industry flows overseas.
License to Kill As precarious as that situation may seem, it starts to look like money in the bank when compared to the process of licensing offline games. Quite simply, the process doesn’t exist. “[Vietnam] doesn’t have any policy that requires a license [for offline games],” says Emobi Games’ young director, Nguyen Tuan Huy. “We told the [relevant] governmental department that we were developing a game and they just asked that we don’t make it too violent or gory. [But] if something
happens after that then we have to take responsibility.” So it’s a bit like playing Super Mario with a blindfold on then. Huy is gamer, but like the country he comes from he doesn’t have a long history of gaming. The first game to make a big impression on him was Call of Duty in 2003 when he was already in his twenties. Yet he’s taken to offline games in a way that has to be respected. “As a gamer, I see offline games as more artistic,” he says. “The gamer must be immersed in the game through the story, art [and] music. And there is always the challenge of technology.” It’s fitting that Huy mentions technology and challenge in the same breath. The reason that Vietnam has no history of gaming is, of course, its lack of technology in the 1980s and 1990s. That in turn has led to a lack of skilled workers. When the Emobi team came together, they had 5 programmers, only one of whom had any experience of games development. “We trained ourselves to solve the problems,” explains Huy, “one by one, day by day.” For three years, with no promise of sales or licensing at the end, it suddenly becomes clear why the back of his business card says “Enjoy Challenges”. I’m reminded of the gaming slogan from the arch-nerd indie programmers who made Dwarf Fortress: “Losing is fun!”
War Games The game itself is unremarkable. A first person shooter, set around the historically
important battle of Dien Bien Phu on the 7th of May 1954, hence the title 7554. It features graphics, gameplay and games mechanics that can’t compare to the big budget American series like Call of Duty and Medal of Honour which inspired it. What sets it apart is the fact that rather than playing the part of a western power taking on traditional baddies like the Germans, Russians, Iraqis or whoever else deserves one hell of a beating, the gamer plays a Viet Minh soldier shooting up Frenchmen. This has caused an outcry in France, but Huy is quick to defend the game. “It’s not an anti-French game,” he says. “I don’t know [if the game will be popular in France], some people will buy it out of curiosity. It’s a Vietnamese story, a battle for freedom and the story of the Viet Minh”. Yet when the roles are reversed, Huy feels a little differently. He has played Call of Duty: Black Ops where the gamer plays an American GI in the thick of the war in Vietnam, and was less keen on the idea. “I felt something like anger,” he says, “The story they tell about the war is not really true. The Viet Minh soldiers in the game look like the baddies — and that’s not true.” Regardless of any foreign hostility to the game, talks are in process for official releases around the world. Emobi have been negotiating with Polish, Russian and French publishers in this regard, but as yet nothing has been signed. If these prospective deals do go ahead it would give some much needed revenue to the company. So far they’ve sold just 5000 copies nationally at VND250,000 per unit with an additional
500 overseas sales. As bad as that sounds it’s actually not terrible considering that the Vietnamese market has no history of paying for official copies of games when pirated discs are available in shops for VND20,000.
A Viable Trade? A more likely stumbling block to overseas sales would appear to be quality. Influential magazine PC Gamer was a little harsh in their appraisal, awarding 7554 just 4.3/10. Yet Huy isn’t too perturbed. “The review was very harsh, but we’re not sad because that was our first game, and not just the first game of a studio, but the first game of a country.” Ultimately, being an offline games producer isn’t a viable business model in today’s Vietnam. Emobi intend to follow up 7554 with an online sci-fi game that can appeal to an international audience and be sold to a foreign publisher. But in the long term they want keep trying to push the envelope of what is possible for the industry in Vietnam in the form of offline games. Many foreign investors are starting to see Vietnam as the perfect base for software companies to take advantage of the SouthEast Asian market. According to Huy, there are some good software companies in Vietnam now that have “high quality programmers and can produce products which are world-class.” That may be true, but to create a truly high quality labour force that can become the country’s emerging middle class, the likes of programmers and games developers need to be given the stability to develop.
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