Hanoi (VNA) – The Authority of Broadcasting, Television, and ElectronicInformation under the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC🅰) on March23 organised a workshop seeking measures to curb payment for illegal games.

Accordingto the authority's statistics, Vietnam currently ranks 7th in the world and2nd in Southeast Asia in terms of the number of game downloads. Vietnam alsoranks 3rd among the region's 10 game application manufacturers. However,Vietnamese companies can only produce 10% of the games which are in circulation inVietnam while the remaining 90% of the games are from abroad.

Theactual number of the games that are circulated in the country is much more.

Le QuangTu Do, Director of the Authority of Broadcasting, Television, and ElectronicInformation, said that there are currently hundreds of thousands of unauthorizedgames being released online, mainly on the app stores of Apple App Store andGoogle Play Store, or Valve Stream. The total revenue of unlicensed games isestimated at nearly 5 trillion VND (212.8 million USD) per year.

Diverse forms of electronic payment have contributed to promoting digitalcontent services and entertainment services such as games, movies, ande-commerce, he said, adding that e-payment is also one of the popular ways forusers to directly pay for unauthorised games.

Besidespayment made when users download games from app stores, many websites alsoallow download of unlicensed and unauthorised games directly, making it morecomplicated to control payment channels/money flows for unau꧙thorized games, theofficial s🅺aid.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Tran Thanh Lam said that theministry will cooperate more closely with the State Bank of Vietnam and theMinistry of Public Security to handle inadequacies in payment for unauthorisedgames.

Theministry also requested organisations and enterprises providing intermediarypayment services to strictly comply with relevant specialised laws andregulations when connecting and paying for ga♐me services.

Theorganisations and enterprises were asked to implement measures to prevent, notconnect, and pay for unauthorized games through their payment systems or whenreceiving requests from state management agencies.

TheAuthority of Broadcasting, Television, and Electronic Information willperiodically send a list of licenced games and a list of unauthorised gam♌es topayment i♏ntermediaries so that they can refuse to provide services if peoplepay for unauthorised games, Lam said./.