A studio with a hit game fails to raise not because the game is not good enough. It fails because the studio and the investor are looking at two different numbers: the studio looks at peak-month revenue, the investor looks at what is left once the product's lifecycle runs out. In 2025, roughly 210 Vietnamese studios shipped more than 27,000 new titles, and the country ranked second in the world for mobile game downloads, behind only China. In the same year, the announced institutional deals into Vietnamese studios could be counted on one hand. I write this from the other side of the table, where I read studio decks as head of corporate development at a publisher.
The studio prices the peak. The investor discounts the lifecycle.
A typical studio deck opens with a rising revenue chart and closes with the best month multiplied by twelve, then by a multiple borrowed from listed game companies. The arithmetic carries a silent assumption: this month's players will still be there next month. Industry data says otherwise.
Across 2025 benchmark sets, mobile games keep about 27% of players after day one, a median of 3 to 4% after day seven, and lose more than 95% by day thirty. In hyper-casual, the genre that put many Vietnamese studios on the download charts, a title's lifecycle typically runs three to six months, and monthly active users often halve within two months of the peak.
So investors do not read revenue by month. They read it by cohort: how much do players who installed in January still generate in March, in June? When most of last month's revenue comes from players acquired in the last thirty days, the studio is buying installs rather than keeping players. The peak is not a baseline. It is an event.
The question I ask in every review: how much did players who installed six months ago spend last month? When a studio can answer that with a number, the conversation starts.
Most of a hit game's revenue does not belong to the studio.
The second number the two sides read differently is gross revenue. Before it reaches the studio it passes through three layers. Platform fees first: Apple and Google keep 30% of in-app purchases, 15% for smaller developers under their reduced-rate programmes. User acquisition second: in 2025 mobile games spent around 25 billion USD on UA against roughly 93 billion USD of industry revenue the year before, so even at the industry average one dollar in four goes straight back into ad networks, and a title in its scaling phase spends far more. Third, the publisher's share, if the studio does not publish itself.
For Vietnamese studios the subtraction is harsher still. Revenue generated by Vietnamese studios was around 315 million USD in 2024 on billions of downloads, with 95% of installs coming from abroad. One industry estimate puts average revenue per user for Vietnamese games at about 0.06 USD against a global average of 0.70 USD. The figure may not be precise to the cent, but the order of magnitude is right: a download-first model produces a great many players and very little money per player.
The logic is the same one I wrote about with Shein and gross margin. The prettiest number on the first page, here gross revenue, says nothing about what remains after the cost of getting the product to the user. Investors value a studio on that remainder, by cohort, after platform fees and after UA. Studios value themselves on the number before the three subtractions. Both sides say "revenue" and point at different lines of the same table.
Investors do not buy games. They buy the machine that makes the next one.
Even with healthy cohort revenue, a game is not yet a company. Early-stage investors pay for the ability to repeat a result, because a result that has already happened is not for sale. In a studio, repeatability lives in the machine: the process for generating and testing ideas, the data used to kill or push a title, the live-ops team, and a pipeline with actual soft-launch dates.
The pattern I see most is a studio with one successful game, one strong producer and one mechanic that landed at the right moment. Together those make a good project, not a machine. Four questions in the first meeting: what is the next game, who is building it, when does it soft launch, and which number will make you stop it? If the answer to the last one is the founder's gut, the machine is one person.
The market has priced this difference explicitly. In December 2025, NCSOFT agreed to buy 67% of Indygo Group, parent of the Vietnamese studio Lihuhu, for about 104 million USD, implying a valuation of around 155 million USD for the whole company. Lihuhu was not bought for a game. Since 2017 it has shipped more than a hundred titles, with 80% of revenue from North America and Europe. The buyer paid for a machine that had repeated its result more than a hundred times.
The industry as a whole is moving the same way. The 2025 Vietnam market report found that 73% of studios had shifted from ad-only to in-app purchase or hybrid models, in-app purchase revenue was up 83% year on year, and 78% of new users in the year came to titles released before 2025. Value is migrating from new launches to long-lived titles, and from downloads to paying players.
A pattern that repeats across the decks on my desk
The sequence is usually the same. The game peaks. The deck goes out one or two months later, while the chart still looks good. The valuation is anchored to the peak month. The investor asks for cohort data and starts diligence. Six to eight weeks later, last month's revenue is well below the deck. The studio holds its valuation, believing it fair for a proven product. The investor comes back with a much lower number, or walks. The deal dies there, usually with the studio feeling undervalued and the investor feeling the studio does not understand itself.
Nobody in this pattern gets the arithmetic wrong. Each side reads its own number correctly. They simply never say which number they are reading. And when the studio returns six months later, often with an offer to sell part or all of the company, the new number is below what the investor once proposed. The cost of the gap lands almost entirely on the studio.
For most studios with a hit, an equity round is the wrong instrument.
An equity round prices a company on its ability to repeat results in the future. A one-hit studio has not proven that, so the investor either passes or offers a price the founder finds insulting. The problem is not the people. It is the instrument.
From the buyer's chair, two other instruments fit a studio's reality better. The first is M&A with an earn-out: part of the price paid at closing, the rest paid against actual revenue over the following 12 to 36 months. Across M&A generally, the median earn-out is around 31% of closing consideration, and in gaming the structure has become increasingly common. An earn-out resolves exactly what the two sides disagree on: the studio keeps the upside if the game lives long, and the buyer does not pay for revenue that has not happened. The second is venture build: the publisher contributes publishing, operations, UA data and capital; the studio contributes production; ownership is split on the next game rather than the existing one. It is the instrument for teams that make excellent products but have no machine behind them, and it is where most of my work at Funtap sits.
An equity round is still the right tool once a studio has two or three titles that have lived past twelve months, a pipeline with dated soft launches, clean cohort data, and a founder who wants to build a company rather than sell a game. In January 2026 a Hanoi mid-core studio raised a 1.5 million USD seed round led by a foreign gaming fund, one of the first deals of its kind in Vietnam. That road exists. It is narrow, and it is not the default for a studio that has just had a hit.
What I am not sure about
The claim that the machine matters more than the game rests on an assumption: making the next game is expensive, so repeatability is scarce. AI tooling is pulling production costs down fast. If that continues, scarcity shifts from production to distribution and data, and the thesis becomes more true for publishers and less true for production studios. The second uncertainty is lifecycle. An 83% one-year rise in in-app purchase revenue at Vietnamese studios suggests hybrid titles retain players far longer than the hyper-casual generation before them. If cohort curves for Vietnamese studios stretch noticeably over the next two years, peak revenue will be more durable than I assume, and the lifecycle discount should shrink. I hold the thesis, and I will revise it on data rather than conviction.
For a studio founder preparing to raise, the first job is not to fix the deck. It is to walk in with the investor's numbers: revenue by cohort, net of platform fees and UA, and a pipeline with dates on it. The second job is to answer one question honestly: whether you want to sell a game or build a company. The two answers lead to two different instruments, and choosing the wrong instrument costs more months than choosing the wrong investor.
A hit proves you can do it once. Investors pay for the second time.
Sources: Vietnamnet, global download ranking 2025 · Vietnamnet, 95% of downloads from abroad · Vietnam mobile game report 2025 (GameGeek, Sensor Tower, AppsFlyer) via Mobidictum · Avvascent, Vietnamese studio revenue 2024, 2025 and deals · InvestGame, NCSOFT and Indygo deal · Mistplay, retention benchmarks 2025 · Segwise, retention benchmarks 2025 · PocketGamer.biz, mobile game lifecycle · Mistplay, user acquisition cost 2025 · Newzoo, mobile game revenue 2024 · Axial, earn-out data 2024 · Norton Rose Fulbright, gaming M&A trends · Dientuungdung.vn, ARPU of Vietnamese games. Industry figures are public and rounded; no internal data from any studio or publisher is used.