A view of Ho Chi Minh City from the offices of Glass Egg Digital Media. Vietnam’s tech sector is a bright spot in the country’s economy.”
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Wandering through Glass Egg Digital Media’s open-plan office, Phil Tran paused beside a game designer’s cubicle and pointed at his computer screen.
A character sprinted across a digital landscape in one of the latest offerings from Mr. Tran’s company, which localizes international video games for online publication in Vietnam and designs 3-D art for games by Sony, Microsoft and Electronic Arts.
“You just run, run, run until you hit something,” said Mr. Tran, who founded Glass Egg in 1999 after a short stint at a computer game start-up in San Francisco.
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Vu Hoang Lien, chairman of the Vietnam Internet Association, a business consortium whose members include state-owned telecommunications providers, said that the legal environment for Internet businesses had been good so far, and that the Communist Party had given “priority support” to the information technology sector.
A few Vietnamese entrepreneurs, on the heels of the closure of Haivl.com last fall, are considering registering their companies in Singapore, where they see more regulatory stability, said Hung Dinh, a veteran of Vietnam’s start-up scene and the chief executive of JoomlArt.com, an international company that creates content-management systems for websites.
Mr. Tran of Glass Egg said there appeared to be a “heightened sense of security” around Internet content in recent months.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a game-stopper,” he said, looking out from his 17th-floor office over Ho Chi Minh City’s skyline. But for young Vietnamese entrepreneurs, he said, “it does have a deterring effect.”
