Illustrative photo (itcvietnam.vn) Hanoi (VNA) – The Authority of Broadcasting, Television, and Electronic Information under the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) on March 23 organised a workshop seeking measures to curb payment for illegal games.
According to the authority's statistics, Vietnam currently ranks 7th in the world and 2nd in Southeast Asia in terms of the number of game downloads. Vietnam also ranks 3rd among the region's 10 game application manufacturers. However, Vietnamese companies can only produce 10% of the games which are in circulation in Vietnam while the remaining 90% of the games are from abroad.
The actual number of the games that are circulated in the country is much more.
Le Quang Tu Do, Director of the Authority of Broadcasting, Television, and Electronic Information, said that there are currently hundreds of thousands of unauthorized games being released online, mainly on the app stores of Apple App Store and Google Play Store, or Valve Stream. The total revenue of unlicensed games is estimated at nearly 5 trillion VND (212.8 million USD) per year.
Diverse forms of electronic payment have contributed to promoting digital content services and entertainment services such as games, movies, and e-commerce, he said, adding that e-payment is also one of the popular ways for users to directly pay for unauthorised games.
Besides payment made when users download games from app stores, many websites also allow download of unlicensed and unauthorised games directly, making it more complicated to control payment channels/money flows for unauthorized games, the official said.
The Authority of Broadcasting, Television, and Electronic Information under the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) on March 23 organises a workshop seeking measures to curb payment for illegal games.(Photo: baochinhphu.vn) Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Tran Thanh Lam said that the ministry will cooperate more closely with the State Bank of Vietnam and the Ministry of Public Security to handle inadequacies in payment for unauthorised games.
The ministry also requested organisations and enterprises providing intermediary payment services to strictly comply with relevant specialised laws and regulations when connecting and paying for game services.
The organisations and enterprises were asked to implement measures to prevent, not connect, and pay for unauthorized games through their payment systems or when receiving requests from state management agencies.
The Authority of Broadcasting, Television, and Electronic Information will periodically send a list of licenced games and a list of unauthorised games to payment intermediaries so that they can refuse to provide services if people pay for unauthorised games, Lam said./.
