May 11th - Industry Analysis

Today we learned about the Mekong River Delta in the morning and then went on a company visit to Glass Egg Digital Media in the afternoon. We will be visiting the Mekong River Delta later in the trip, so it was good to hear more about the area and the difficulties posed by climate change. The reason that climate change is such a big issue in the region is because the delta contains very low lying land that is susceptible to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

In the afternoon at Glass Egg, we learned more about the video game and graphics industry. This company specializes in designing video game graphics and artwork. Most of their business is in creating cars for racing video games such as Forza and Need for Speed. But they also work on modeling characters and landscapes for other video games. Glass Egg is considered an outsourcing company because companies like Microsoft will hire them to design cars for the new games they are developing. The video game industry is very fast moving but Glass Egg seems to have established loyal customers and shown that they can survive in the industry. They have been around for over 15 years and have many large accounts such as Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Glass Egg has proven that they can meet deadlines and have a stringent quality control process that involves checking the artwork and coding of the 3D model. Most of what they do caters to a very niche market, so they need to make sure that they have a good reputation and make sure that their customers stay with them. There are two main competitors in the industry, one in China and the other in India. They cater to a wide variety of companies all around the world, since the video game industry is a very international business. Most of their employees are Vietnamese, but they have a leadership team made up of people from different countries. This helps them stay competitive because international corporations like dealing with people who are familiar with the cultural norms of their home country. I did not know much about the video game industry before going to Glass Egg and it was interesting to hear how video games are developed. Thanks for reading.