Startup Company

Got it on sale and it's a fair price. Gameplay loop is enjoyble for a couple playthroughs. Once you know what's what, it's just a matter of how quickly you get to the point where you start buying stuff using an army of sales execs. Oh and absolutely use a mod to bulk order. In my latest playthrough I aimed for 200 sales execs. With somewhat optimized early game you get there very quickly. Then you really ramp it up. By day 800 you can easily have all websites maxed out with 2 video ads and ad obfuscator earning about 500m per day per website. Then it's all about watching the numbers go up.

I love simulator games, I really do. But this is the first time i ever played one and felt utterly shocked and defeated. At first i assumed it was actually in early access but no it isn't. Either i was just not understanding the basic gameplay requirements or there's something off about it. I went bankrupt about 5 times before taking the L and deleting it. I'm astonished that a game would give me a sum of money and allow me to go 3 in-game years before making profits. we do get money by completing benchmarks in the game, but for 3 whole years my company cannot make a single dollar in return on the investments i make. the employees demand a much higher salary than any simulation game I've ever played. The bills continue to climb with the costs and by the time you actually start to make profits, you can't ever break even fast enough. on a good run my first few days of actually making income amounts to a maximum of $2k while my bills are $10k and more. Again maybe it's just me who didn't understand the concept and gameplay loop but it was really frustrating to play and never see any payoff until you eventually go bankrupt.

I was interested in the premise of this game and generally like management and tycoon games. However, this is a very poor example of the genre. The "simulation" tag is laughable, and while I'm willing to forgive some simplifications for the sake of game mechanics, the simplifications in Startup Company are just laziness from the developers that don't pay off in game mechanics. The only revenue model is to build websites and either put advertising on them or sell subscriptions. This makes more sense for some website types (streaming service, video sharing, social media) than others (shopping). Websites are made of features. Most features, IIRC called "basic features", are interchangeable: for each level of each basic feature, your website can support more users. (Not in the sense of being more scalable or anything; there are completely separate game mechanics for that.) If one "basic feature" is at a higher level than a different one, user satisfaction goes down (even--especially--if you're just adding a new feature). Features are made of interchangeable "components" and "modules" that are produced by designers, developers, and "lead developers" (a totally separate category from "d…

Some people seem to struggle to get into it, but the game is honestly not that hard. It may require some patience but I found it to be very rewarding and somewhat addicting. It is a lot of fun.

Honestly it's paced painfully slow, especially in the beginning. You wait forever to be able to do anything. Also managing this "tech company" feels like running a huge scam company, since all they have is a bunch of websites, which is not how a company works except if you are a web designer. But that's not really how it's advertised. If you like feeling like you're running a large scale scam company or like slow paced business games, it might be for you - but it's certainly not for me.

Funny - Silly - Strategic