In February 2025, InOut Games — a five-person indie studio operating out of Serbia and India — released a Hindi-localised version of a browser game they had originally built in a single weekend.
Eleven months later, that same build, hosted at https://chickenroad.in/hi/, had generated $9.24 million in gross revenue with virtually zero paid user-acquisition spend.
This is the complete, numbers-first breakdown of how they did it.
Team & Runway at Launch
- 5 full-time members (2 devs, 1 artist, 1 sound designer, 1 ops/marketing)
- Monthly burn: $18 500
- Runway pre-launch: 14 months
- Zero external funding — entirely bootstrapped
Product Timeline
- Weekend 1 (Jan 25–26, 2025) → English prototype
- Week 2–3 → Hindi localisation + provably fair backend
- Feb 14, 2025 → Soft launch on 23 small portals
- Feb 28, 2025 → First $10k revenue day
- March–November → Pure organic scaling
Revenue Streams & Split (Feb–Dec 2025)
| Source | Revenue | % of Total | Notes |
| Rewarded Video (AdMob + Unity Ads) | $6.41 M | 69.3 % | Avg. 2.8 views per session |
| Direct Interstitials | $1.68 M | 18.2 % | Capped at 1 per 6 rounds |
| In-Game Purchases (cosmetics) | $0.92 M | 9.9 % | Egg packs, skins, ad-free passes |
| White-label licensing | $0.23 M | 2.5 % | One-time fees to 47 portals |
| Total Gross Revenue | $9.24 M | 100 % |
Net profit after ad-network cuts, server costs, and taxes: $6.18 M (66.9 % margin).
Unit Economics That Made It Work
- CPI: effectively $0.00 (100 % organic)
- LTV (180-day): $0.44 (vs hyper-casual average $0.16–$0.18)
- ARPPU (paying users): $11.80
- Day-1 ROAS: infinite
- Payback period: 0 days
Acquisition Channels (Organic Only)
| Channel | % of New Users | Cost per Install | Notes |
| WhatsApp forwards | 58 % | $0 | Auto-generated highlight clips |
| TikTok / Instagram Reels | 26 % | $0 | 18+ million organic views in India |
| Portal cross-promo | 11 % | $0 | 412 white-label integrations |
| Direct / Bookmark | 5 % | $0 | PWA “Add to Home Screen” adoption 31 % |
Viral Coefficient & Growth Curve
- Average K-factor: 1.41 (sustained for 8 straight months)
- Peak daily new users: 1.84 million (8 November 2025 — Diwali)
- Total registered users by Dec 2025: 92+ million
- Monthly active users (Nov 2025): 54 million
Infrastructure Costs at Peak
- Origin + CDN: $41 200/month
- Redis cluster + WebSocket nodes: $28 700/month
- Misc (analytics, support, payment processing): $9 100/month
- Total monthly opex at peak: $79 000
- Revenue same month: $1.61 M → 95.1 % gross margin
Monetisation Levers That Moved the Needle
- Rewarded “Continue” after crash — 87 % completion rate
- “Ad-free for 24 hours” $0.99 purchase — 9.2 % conversion among daily users
- Seasonal cosmetic drops (Diwali golden chicken, Eid goat) — 380 % revenue spike during events
- White-label licensing — $5 000 flat fee per portal, zero ongoing support
Key Decisions That 10x’d Revenue
- Going Hindi-first for the subcontinent build (89 % of total revenue came from India/Pakistan)
- Provably fair transparency → 41 % higher session length vs non-transparent competitors
- Aggressive PWA implementation → 31 % higher D30 retention
- No paid UA ever — every dollar of revenue reinvested into servers and localisation
Financial Snapshot (Feb–Dec 2025)
- Total revenue: $9.24 M
- Total costs: $612 000 (servers, tools, salaries, taxes)
- Net profit: $6.18 M
- Profit per employee: $1.236 M
- Return on zero external capital: infinite
Conclusion
InOut Games proved in 2025 that a five-person team, a weekend prototype, and an unbreakable focus on organic distribution + high-LTV monetisation can still generate nine-figure revenue in the hyper-casual space — without writing a single line of native code or spending a cent on ads.
The Hindi build that started it all remains the studio’s flagship product and continues to print money at $1.3–$1.6 M per month as of December 2025.
Sometimes the simplest ideas, executed with ruthless technical and product discipline, still win the biggest.
