VTC Multimedia Corporation and Microsoft Vietnam on Thursday signed a comprehensive strategic partnership in the 2022-25 period with an aim to leverage Viet Nam’s e-sport market.
Under the cooperation, Microsoft and VTC will focus on four main areas. Accordingly, after signing, Microsoft authorised VTC to release Age of Empires (AoE) games versions I, II, III, and IV in Viet Nam. VTC would publish, distribute, build, and officially deploy e-sports tournaments and make AoE an official sport in national and regional e-sports tournaments.
In addition, Microsoft will build a hybrid cloud platform for VTC and connect VTC's data centre with Microsoft's global network of data centres to provide the best service for developers operating games in the market.
It would also support VTC to become a game start-up centre in Viet Nam.
VTC will invest resources to implement the project, taking advantage of Microsoft's technological strength in the field of games, infrastructure platforms, digital working environment, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and solutions for digital security.
Nguyen Quynh Tram, General Director of Microsoft Viet Nam, said: “Microsoft defines its mission in the gaming industry as bringing joy and building a gaming community to all people in the world.”
“In 2021 alone, Viet Nam added 8 million digital consumers. Digital life has become daily, in which games are the field that accounts for a large proportion. Through classic games, content creation services, development of modern games and expansion of strategic cooperation with pioneers such as VTC, Microsoft hopes to create a breakthrough, contributing to creating great value for Viet Nam's digital economy,” she added.
Nguyen Ngoc Bao, General Director of VTC, said: “VTC is the pioneer in introducing the e-sports concept and successfully implementing it in Viet Nam through a tournament system, typically the Vietnam eSports Championship. With available internal resources and future development ambitions, the strategic co-operation between Microsoft and VTC hopes to create many breakthrough values for the Vietnamese gaming and e-sports market.”
Currently, the world has about 3 billion people playing games and by 2030 this number is expected to increase to 4.5 billion people. Gaming is a nearly US$200 billion industry with double-digit year-on-year growth.
In Southeast Asia, Viet Nam is considered a game powerhouse in the region. According to statistics, Viet Nam currently ranks 7th in the world and 2nd in Southeast Asia in terms of the number of game downloads. In addition, Viet Nam is also ranked 3rd in the Top 10 game application manufacturers in the region. For every 25 games downloaded, there is one game produced in a Vietnamese studio. — VNS