Our third day in Saigon came with a surprise. After our daily morning classes at the university, the planned lunch for the day was actually McDonald’s. At first, I was hesitant to the idea given that I had not eaten McDonald’s in as long as I can remember but it was an interesting experience to see the differences in menu items compared to United States restaurants. Directly after was a very interesting tour of the Glass Egg Digital Media office, an art production studio and game developer. You might not have heard of this company, but they have been involved in the graphics of some of the most successful gaming franchises. Some you may recognize are the Forza Franchise, Need for Speed, Battlefield, Call of Duty, and the very recent Spiderman game. This firm is unique compared to its competitors in that the employees are highly trained and of the 400 total employees, only 5 are foreigners. Looking at the types of jobs in the firm, 300 of the total employees are the artists while the remaining 100 include management and other staff. Of the artists, Glass Egg more so searches for those with a unique scope and view on their projects. The COO of the company stated that they will never try to teach the way an artist uses their creativity but the skills in digital design can be learned. Branching from this, there are a handful of artists that had never touched a computer before working with the firm. Since the firm is an outsourcing firm, game companies from all over the world give them a structured idea of what the game should be and the artists are able to create the initial graphics how they imagined it for development and editing later on. There is a branching company called Tirawa that was started because Glass Egg wanted to contribute to the mobile game market as well. The artists in this branching company have a blank canvas for idea, game, and character development since they are not doing console game graphics for big companies.

Glass Egg Digital Media strives to be the best they can possibly be at what they do in order to be successful rather than expending to other possible industries. The company will accept projects from those who are looking for graphics in industries other than the gaming industry, but they will not seek out thus type of work. Much of their competitors are Chinese firms which poses a slight problem for Glass Egg in that they have to encourage clients to come to Vietnam in order to do business. While this may be an initial issue, the firm works mostly with repeat customers of huge gaming companies such as Microsoft Studios, EA, and Activision. Not only are their clients often returning, the job retention rate is significantly higher than their competing Chinese firms. With this, in order to keep employees and artists happy, they are able to change concentrations from something like vehicle design to character design if there is an available project for it. When considering the competition from other Vietnamese digital media, the firms look at each other more as “frenemies” rather than enemies. All competitors in Vietnam realize that there is a lot of potential for growth and development of this industry in the future which is why instead of trying to “win” against each other, they work together for the benefit of Vietnam as a whole. Growth and success in Vietnam itself is a tremendously important aspect of business for many in-country firms. Firms recognize the potential of the growing economy of the country which, in turn, benefits the citizens as a whole. In the case of Glass Egg, the work they do to develop graphics for video games is what makes a game as realistic and engaging as it is. Glass Egg is not only helping their country by encouraging the industry to grow, but providing realistic and fun entertainment for the world.