Have you ever said to yourself, "My golly! If only I, as a six year old, had the foresight to found Facebook, sell peoples' personal data, and make billions!" and lament that it is 2024 instead of 2004? Well buddy get in this time machine because the American election isn't going to influence itself!

Startup Company is a corporate-themed Factorio clone, created by 3D apartment floorplan artists from Denmark. You take on the role of a CEO and, acting under the guise of "software development", carry out as much money laundering and stock manipulation as possible before you reach retirement age.

I think there's basically two ways of evaluating a tycoonish game like this: Splitting into "do we judge it based on its 'premise' or being a software/platform/live service company", or "do we judge it on it being a money printing company". I mean, it would be nice if we had the two concepts in the same package, but in this particular game, it's super split. Though the game's description is "build your very own website and compete against the largest tech giants on the planet!", this is not how you play the game. It's not so much a "make a web site/web service" simulator as it is a kinda "make a lot of money by buying or spinning off shell companies that harvest users and sell off those users to other companies".

You start off with your own downtown office building with yourself and one or two other employees, cranking out resources, flavoured as various front end and back end modular components of a website. You throw up a quick page for your site and put ads on it so you don't go bankrupt immediately. Over time you can grow your user base by running ads for your platform, itself, and upgrading your servers to handle the increased load, hiring more developers to match the upkeep.

You must develop your site to accommodate an increase in users. This somewhat makes sense as a general concept. If your code quality is poor, it won't scale well to handle increased users. However, the scaling is pretty unrealistic, especially when it comes to the features you're supposedly implementing. Trying to play the game (presumably as intended) is relatively impossible because it takes like five years with a dev team of 30 to create the feature "have a profile page" or "add file uploads".

Meanwhile, your devs are constantly receiving offers for seven figure salaries at FAANG, demanding week long vacations immediately after getting hired or (better yet) *while* completing their free, company-paid education/training. Assuredly this is because of the literal rocket science they are doing to implement the feature "add comments" to a website that somehow has 80,000 users who do nothing but happily refresh the site's index page, awaiting changes.

The other downside is that you can't really create anything that isn't a recognisable idea. Technology unicorns are now a standard formula for development. When you spin up a new website, it's basically 'What do you want to make?' Options:

• I Can't Believe It's Not Facebook
  
• I Can't Believe It's Not Youtube
  
• I Can't Believe It's Not Twitch
  
• I Can't Believe It's Not Amazon
  
• I Can't Believe It's Not Twitter
  
• etc.

In this regard, it just doesn't have either the realistic mechanics or adequate depth of possibilities that let me enjoy it as a software development simulation.

Fortunately (Unfortunately?), making software is not actually how you make money and succeed in the game. You make money and succeed in the game by spending fifteen minutes throwing together cheap shovelware with some of the most basic construction elements. Then, intensely advertise it for a day, attract 100,000 users, sell off the company, and repeat on loop forever, making infinitely more money selling users' data than creating legitimate software. In this regard, the game is quite realistic. I mean, I guess it worked out for Jack Dorsey? So if you might like it for that aspect, please enjoy!

That said, I can't say it's for me. I bought this game when it hit Early Access and, at the time, shared the sentiment that it had potential if it could just be hit with a wrench a few times and nudged into shape. But over two years, I can't name a single thing they added or changed during that Early Access period. Four years after that, I think I've settled on the decision that I just don't think it's very good. So, my review is negative.

very realistic. It's a like running a company. But later on it becomes an idle game. You just have no incentive to develop higher level stuff when you can just exploit low level ones.

Capitalism Rules!