OneState maker ChillBase is quietly making millions by meeting the demand for GTA-likes

The maker of GTA-like roleplaying game OneState is looking forward to the GTA 6 launch – and says he’s surprised so few mobile studios are meeting the demand for open world crime games.

OneState developer ChillBase was founded in 2020 by Matvei Lipatnikov, and is headquartered in Cyprus. AppMagic estimates suggest that since launch in April 2022, OneState has earned $85.6m in IAP revenue from 62.3m downloads. It is currently pulling in over $5m a month, according to those figures.

Lipatnikov would not confirm or deny the accuracy of those estimates, but told us that OneState’s income is also generated through its web store – so the total is likely higher.

“In all honesty, I’m still surprised such a game had not been created sooner,” Lipatnikov says of his studio’s GTA-like game OneState. “There have always been open worlds. There have always been roleplay communities. Nobody, however, was putting these two things together.”

ChillBase began six years ago as a team of 20, and Lipatnikov says most of the team at ChillBase were – and still are – avid roleplayers. “This background and the mindset that came with it proved invaluable when we were creating ChillBase,” Lipatnikov says. “They provided us with insider knowledge of the roleplay community.”

Asked specifically about whether he saw a gap in the market for a GTA-style mobile game, Lipatnikov insists the idea was “never to build a clone of some other game’s open world.”

“Instead, we saw a very real gap in the mobile market: people wanted a game with true freedom and social roleplay potential, and we were happy to oblige,” he continues.

Having started out with a team of 20, ChillBase now has “hundreds” of staff working remotely and at offices in Cyprus, Dubai, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus and Georgia, says Lipatnikov. He stopped short of providing an exact headcount, but said the scale of the team often surprises people.

“They imagine mobile game development to involve a skeleton crew that simply ‘keeps the lights on.’ OneState does not work like that: it is an ever-expanding world with hundreds of players online at any given moment. It takes some serious engineering and manpower to keep everything ticking – thus the team grew and continues to grow.”

While Lipatnikov wouldn’t confirm or deny that estimated lifetime revenue figure of ~$86m when asked, he did stress that the game’s income will never include ad monetisation.

“We don’t do ads in OneState – that is and will continue to be non-negotiable,” he says. “Immersion is the heart and soul of the game; pulling someone away from that experience to watch an ad would ruin that and would cost us in the long term.”

“The way we do monetisation is closer in spirit to how real-life luxury goods work than to the mobile game standard,” he explained. “Take a luxury watch, for example: such an item is bought for the status it carries, not for its timekeeping. The same goes for OneState’s monetisation.”

Player-run gangs are a significant part of that revenue, too, since gang members “often make collective purchases to maintain their status in the game,” says Lipatnikov.

OneState’s product page states up to 900 players can exist on one server at once, something Lipatnikov attributes to years of unglamorous backend work.

“Your average phone cannot handle 900 people’s worth of input at once, so the bulk of our work goes into filtering how much detail is fed to a player at any given time,” he said. “If something is close to you in the game, it must be detailed for the sake of immersion – when you move to things that are considerably further away, the degree of that detail begins to drop off.”

“Servers regularly get full,” he continues. “When we open new ones, they often fill up in under eight hours.”

He was also keen to stress that these are real players, and not bots. “A world with 900 real humans will behave differently from one with only 200 and 700 ‘puppets’ as padding,” said Lipatnikov.

As for how the upcoming release of GTA 6 could impact OneState, Lipatnikov doesn’t believe the November launch has meaningfully impacted his business yet.

“Our core product offering has been steadily getting better, we’ve been expanding into new markets, and the game’s community has been expanding in a self-sustaining fashion,” he insisted. “None of these factors are related to GTA 6 or its launch.”

“This summer, for example, saw us as the second-highest-grossing action game in the US iOS market. This, I believe, was achieved due to the combined power and allure of social roleplaying and the world we’ve created. The audience for such a roleplay-first experience has long existed – they were just waiting for a game to come to life that would cater to their needs.”

In fact, when GTA 6 does launch, Lipatnikov believes OneState “will be affected in a good way – though that won’t be in a ‘riding the wave’ sense. A launch of this scale will bring the shared aspect of OneState’s core fantasy – living how you want to online – to a truly massive audience.”

“We’re not competing with Rockstar – nor would it make sense for us to do so,” he adds. “Rockstar is the best at what they do: AAA single-player games for consoles and PC. Our investment in OneState spans the better part of a decade, and we have extensive plans for the world we’ve created. Plans that look far into the future.”