OneState developer ChillBase earns millions by filling mobile's GTA-like void

ChillBase, the studio behind mobile roleplay game OneState, is capitalizing on what founder Matvei Lipatnikov sees as an overlooked gap in mobile gaming: open-world crime games focused on social interaction rather than single-player storytelling.

Since its April 2022 launch, OneState has generated an estimated $85.6 million in in-app purchase revenue from 62.3 million downloads, according to AppMagic data. The game currently pulls in over $5 million monthly, though Lipatnikov notes the total is higher when including revenue from the web store.

"In all honesty, I'm still surprised such a game had not been created sooner," Lipatnikov told MobileGamer.biz. "There have always been open worlds. There have always been roleplay communities. Nobody, however, was putting these two things together."

Lipatnikov founded ChillBase in 2020 with a team of 20, most of whom were experienced roleplayers rather than veterans of big-time mobile publishing. That background proved crucial. "They provided us with 'insider' knowledge of the roleplay community," he explained. The team has since expanded to "hundreds" of staff to support OneState's live operations.

The studio deliberately avoided cloning existing open-world games. Instead, Lipatnikov said the pitch focused on what mobile players actually wanted: "a game with true freedom and social roleplay potential." OneState's original concept centered on a social roleplay world where players' roles emerge through interactions and how they live within that space.

Player-run gangs form a significant revenue driver. Gang members "often make collective purchases to maintain their status in the game," Lipatnikov noted. The monetization approach differs sharply from typical mobile games. "The way we do monetisation is closer in spirit to how real-life luxury goods work than to the mobile game standard," he said. "Take a luxury watch: such an item is bought for the status it carries, not for its timekeeping. The same goes for OneState's monetisation."

Notably, OneState has never used ad monetization. "We don't do ads in OneState – that is and will continue to be non-negotiable," Lipatnikov emphasized. "Immersion is the heart and soul of the game; pulling someone away from that experience to watch an ad would ruin that."

OneState supports up to 900 concurrent players per server, a figure Lipatnikov attributes to extensive backend optimization 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 explained. The studio uses dynamic detail scaling, reducing graphical fidelity as players move away from nearby objects to maintain immersion. Servers regularly fill to capacity and often max out within eight hours of opening.

Lipatnikov stressed that all 900 players per server are genuine users, not bots. "A world with 900 real humans will behave differently from one with only 200 and 700 'puppets' as padding," he said.

Regarding competition from the upcoming GTA 6 launch in November, Lipatnikov expressed confidence in OneState's distinct position. He said the game's steady growth in summer 2024, when it ranked as the second-highest-grossing action game on US iOS, stems from the strength of social roleplay rather than riding trends. "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 stated. "None of these factors are related to GTA 6 or its launch."

Rather than viewing GTA 6 as a threat, Lipatnikov sees it as validation. "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." He noted ChillBase operates in a different space: "We're not competing with Rockstar – nor would it make sense for us to do so. Rockstar is the best at what they do: AAA single-player games for consoles and PC."