Managing the ACG Industry as the Key to Unlocking National IP Success

For years, animation, comics, and games—commonly abbreviated as ACG—were positioned as a complement to the entertainment industry, a sub-sector accompanying film and television without ever truly being established as an independent economic engine. However, that constellation is now shifting. The latest data from the Indonesia Animation Report 2026, released by the Indonesian Animation Industry Association together with the National Research and Innovation Agency and Dian Nuswantoro University, records that the national animation industry’s value reached Rp798.15 billion in 2025, growing at an average of 12.86 percent per year and surging 3.3-fold over the past decade. More interesting than the sheer magnitude of the figure is its composition, as for the first time, revenue from original animation works based on intellectual property surpassed revenue from exported animation services, with an increase reaching 279.53 percent compared to 2015. This phenomenon marks a fundamental shift, from Indonesia being a cheap animation workshop for foreign studios, to a country that is beginning to dare to manage its own stories. This shift is what this article seeks to dissect: that the integrated management of the ACG industry is the key to unlocking the success of Indonesia’s national intellectual property, not merely a cosmetic programme of the creative economy. The Ministry of Creative Economy notes that the creative industry’s overall contribution reached 7.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2024, with a target to rise to 8.37 percent by 2029. According to the Director of Printing and Photography at the Ministry of Creative Economy, Iman Santosa, ACG is now positioned as a new engine driving the global creative economy, no longer a stepchild among the fashion and culinary sub-sectors that have long dominated budget allocations. The problem is that great potential without mature management is merely a figure on paper. Indonesia’s game industry is the most obvious example. Based on data from Mordor Intelligence, Indonesia leads the Southeast Asian game market share with 29.45 percent in 2025, supported by smartphone adoption reaching 99.4 percent among internet users in 2024. However, a large market does not automatically mean IP sovereignty, as most players still act as consumers and distributors of foreign games, not creators of intellectual property that can be exported back to the global market. Presidential Regulation 19/2024, which coordinates across ministries to boost the share of domestic developers, is a good initial step, with an annual private investment target of 40 million US dollars, but that figure still lags far behind the investment scale of neighbouring countries that have made ACG a pillar of cultural diplomacy strategy. The comparison with South Korea is perhaps the most instructive for understanding the distance Indonesia still has to travel. According to data from the Korea Creative Content Agency, the Korean game industry generated revenue of 23.8 trillion won in 2024 and contributed 60.4 percent of Korea’s total content exports, which reached 14.1 billion US dollars. The webtoon industry, the womb for many drama and film adaptations, grew 4.4 percent to 2.2856 trillion won in the same year, with exports concentrated to Japan at 49.5 percent and North America at 21 percent. What distinguishes Korea is not merely individual creative talent, but institutional architecture. KOCCA functions as a single agency that integrates research funding, export support, and investment financing within one coherent policy framework, with a neatly divided budget allocation ranging from 1.044 billion won for research to 751 billion won for export support. Japan shows a similar pattern on a more massive scale. The Association of Japanese Animations recorded that the anime industry reached an all-time high in 2024, valued at 3.84 trillion yen or equivalent to 25.25 billion US dollars, with overseas revenue now having surpassed domestic revenue since 2023. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry places the content industry as a priority on par with steel and semiconductors, targeting an increase in overseas revenue for the content industry from 2.1 trillion yen to 6 trillion yen by 2033 through the New Cool Japan strategy. The IP360 programme launched by METI even provides grants of up to 10 million yen for independent developers, covering the pre-production process through to localisation and overseas promotion. The consistent pattern from these two countries is the government’s courage to treat ACG as an industrial and trade policy instrument with equal standing to other strategic manufacturing sectors. The comparison with Australia actually presents a lesson in a different direction. As a developed country with an established creative industry base, the scale of Australia’s support for the game sub-sector is relatively modest; Screen Australia only invested three million Australian dollars in the 2024 to 2025 fiscal year to support 49 games and 200 developers. This scale is far smaller than Korea or Japan, yet it demonstrates institutional maturity worth noting through the integration of film and game funding bodies under one consistent institutional roof across political cycles. Within the ASEAN sphere, Thailand and the Philippines offer models that Indonesia should pay attention to due to their similar positions as developing countries with abundant creative resources but capital limitations. According to ASEAN Magazine, the Philippines has made its creative industry, including animation and game development, a contributor of 3.2 billion US dollars to the economy in 2018 and ranks first in the ASEAN region for copyright-based creative services. Thailand has stepped further through an explicit soft power strategy that emulates the Cool Japan model.