Here's a game that breaks every mobile rule and prints money doing it: Idle Obelisk Miner looks like a DOS game from 1995, has no tutorial, no ads, and almost no marketing — and it's doing an estimated $100K a day on just 4-5K downloads. One developer, a fanatical community, and unit economics nobody else can touch. We break down Idle Obelisk Miner (by Checkbox Entertainment) — a one-man-hit-wonder in the same family as The Tower and Level Devil. They cover the deliberately old-school design (mono Sound Blaster music, pure text, "here's the game, figure it out, we don't care if you don't"), the deep idle systems (mining, crafting with crit chances, drones, prestige, the obelisk DPS-gate, event automation), why it plays like an "unfolding game" that keeps moving your engagement to new mechanics, and the extraordinary numbers: ~$100K/day IAP on ~4-5K downloads/day, pristine tier-one traffic, ~$13 revenue-per-download (versus ~$3 for Golden Goblins), and an ARPDAU multiples above The Tower — all built on a spend-depth the crew estimates at ~$40-50K. The story behind it: solo developer Alex William Olds in Northern Ireland, an "anti-mobile-game" philosophy (no ads, no pop-ups, purchases quarantined in a dedicated store), a 57K-member Discord and a 14K/40K-weekly Reddit, three years of flatlining before the feature set finally hit and retention went positive, and a steady migration of hardcore players from The Tower. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 A one-man-hit-wonder like The Tower — Idle Obelisk Miner 02:30 "Here's the game, figure it out" — the no-tutorial design 06:15 Mining, crafting, drones & the obelisk DPS gate 14:30 The unfolding-game design and why prestige works here 16:55 Why an idle game with no ads is the right call 17:40 The numbers — $100K/day on 5K downloads 24:00 Build it for yourself — the one-man-wonder thesis 27:30 The community engine — 57K Discord, stealing Tower players This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa. http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100 -------------------------------------- PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers. Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/ They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it. - Scale fast - Keep your shares - Drawdown only as needed - Have PvX take downside risk alongside you + Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale. Our sponsor FastSpring: Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years They power top mobile publishers around the world Launch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg. This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously. Panelists: Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it! Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple! Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me
