The Startup: Interactive Game Wiki

You’re probably like me. You saw an advertisement, though that the game looked interesting, and hoped that it would live up to your expectations. Sadly, that’s just not the reality. The reality is that the game is truly unplayable unless you spend money on the game. Basically how it works, the entire game is based around money. If you overspend (the game money), you either have to restart from the beginning or you have to buy a subscription for the game. If you don’t spend enough money, you are forced to wait hours for you ‘team’ to complete tasks. Or you, can just spend money on the game and not have to wait. The reality is that the game is paywall after paywall, pressuring you to purchase a subscription. And it’s not cheap, $5 a week (roughly $260 a year), or get this, $40 annually. The developers know that you’re not going to spend long that a few weeks/months on this game, so they pressure you to make a smaller annual purchase rather than pay the full amount weekly. In my opinion, the developers are money-hungry animals that do not care about the game or the consumer, but rather on their paycheck.

The game is very pay to play. I had this for a day to delete. The reason I gave it an astounding two stars instead of one is because of the game itself. If you can get past the obtuse paywall you can actually have a good time. But unfortunately the game is bloated with a paywall that severely ruins the experience. YOU LITERALLY HAVE TOO WAIT IN BETWEEN CHUNKS OF THE GAME FROM ANYWHERE FROM 30 MINUTES TO AN HOUR. It’s psychotic. And the only way to skip it is if you have a subscription or watch 3 ads (either way they get money) it’s a terrible business model. And when you get to the grand release of the app you don’t even get to continue managing your company. It just completely ends. Wait a few months after this review to try it. Because right now it’s not worth it.

I lost interest when the mentor said I had a stupid startup name,I’m like ?? Way to offend. I mean I guess these things happen but I don’t feel a personal connection with my startup- yes I’m putting together a team but there’s no other connection. I don’t feel as money hungry as these people in the purchase startup world. In real life I work hard and have a startup so it’s ironic for them to even think business people won’t play the game or to see the game as a quick money move. I click the ad because I don’t play games but I can relate to being an entrepreneur. As a real entrepreneur it’s about creating demand I’m not sure that these developers understand the Essenes behind things. This is an irrelevant offensive game that won’t get my money.

This is the first and only review I’ve written. This game is created by scum that are only interested in your money. I have no issues with buying games or spending money on in game purchases whatsoever. I actually think that more games should cost money due to the amount of work put in some of them. But this game is a joke. Not even 5 minutes into the game you begin a task where you team is “building something” and it is a 45 minute wait time so it automatically takes you to a screen to show you the options to purchase the premium version for either 5 dollars a week or 40 dollars a year (obviously trying to get you to spend 40). Every single building task or waiting task is 10 minutes to an hour, and they are very frequent. Oh what’s that? You accidentally clicked the wrong selection? Game over, start from the beginning, because the selection goes through as soon as it’s touched. I decided to spend 5 dollars just to see how much farther it would take me. The full game takes probably 20 minutes to beat and you don’t even get to see how well your business does on launch day, because the game ends on launch day. Don’t waste your money on this garbage. The absolute worst use of 5 dollars in my life.

Started the intro, did not even finish it before deleting, you have to wait 45min for one part of the intro because the “team is building” something and you have to pay to skip it, and theres no x button, your stuck there on a screen of them advertising you top buy the premium where you get “the whole storyline” no one wants to pay for the story line, there is already forces ads, either give the whole storyline free with forced ads or give it paid with absolutely 0 ads. Its already clear that the whole game is just made to make you sit on a timer screen for hours to advertise their iap until you make one more action that causes you to have to sit even longer and see more ads. Even more, there is Lots of glitches, cant even start the game because when trying to hire the first people it will glitch and tell me “designers not available yet” when im trying to hire a developer. Who wants to buy premium to a game that does not even function?

I don’t have an issue spending money on games, but this game is monetized in the worst way possible. From the moment you start, all you do is pick between 3 options at a time, with the best option for you costing the most ingame currency, . Run out of the in game currency? Spend real money, or restart, while this time, being forced to pick the worst options in order to spend the least ingame currency. This is basically the entire game. And every 3 or 4 dialogues, you’ll be shown a screen asking you to either wait an hour, or pay $5 a week to continue playing. Although, it can easily be bypassed by changing your phone’s date. And what’s funny is that the game is not even complete yet. Once you’ve done nothing but tapping options that affect you the worst in each situation, you’re greeted by a message saying that you’ve completed chapter one, and the rest are “coming soon”. What a joke. Spend your time playing something else

Saw this game in the App Store and thought I’d give it a try. It looked like a lot of fun until I started playing it. It is impossible to enjoy this game whatsoever without in app purchases. Unless you make all of the cheapest options, you’ll run out of money too early. When this happens the game will prompt you to purchase more in game currency. The next issue is every time you restart the game, you have to sit through all the in game “waits” which are an hour long! This is of course to get you to purchase the premium version which includes no wait time. And trust me, you’ll run out of money in game and have to restart more than once. Lastly, the game is super short! Without the waiting periods in game, it’s maybe 5 minutes of actual game play which is ridiculous. So unless you plan on paying for this game, it’s not even worth the download and even then it’s not long enough to be enjoyable.

This game looked to be amazing. After playing a similar game coffee inc I hoped this would be something similar. What I immediately found out is that they made this game almost impossible to even start playing without spending money. You start out by choosing staff, office space, servers, etc and picking all mid to low options runs you out of money quick. I even noticed I wasn’t allowed to buy something for 10k when I had 16k still, it just kept telling me to buy more in game money. Also the in app purchases are insane, like an in game credit card where they want up to $30 per week. Who would ever pay that for a mobile game. It’s a shame because this game appears to be very well done graphically and content wise but you can’t accomplish much of anything and the cash grabbing behavior is just obscene.

This game is just really trying to take money for you, at first I didn’t think it was that bad you pay for a better credit card to be able to earn more at the beginning but I didn’t even get to start making money before I realized that if you make a choice and don’t leave yourself with enough money which is probably hard to do. That you have to pay to get more. If you decide you didn’t want that choice guess what? You have to pay to go back a step and that’s where I decided not to play anymore. I’m not downloading a free game that has adds them to do anything I have to pay? Yea I don’t think so. Don’t download it’s just a waste of space and the whole 2 hours for you to get through some waiting time let alone I didn’t even finish making my startup so who knows what else you have to wait in real time for.

K so I should’ve read reviews first. I thought It was a great idea. The interface seemed nice. But what the heck is with the massive paywall?? I played thru the first bit and ran out of money. I went back thru and purchased the absolute lowest price on everything and still ran out of money? You literally have to spend real money on this game to play it. Absolutely trash on behalf of the developer(s). They’re banking on people dishing out so much money for a game I would not pay a penny to play. Avoid this game and support real developers building real games that don’t kill the users wallet. And if the developers can see this comment, shame on you. Your game is trash. Your business practices are trash, and you may swindle some poor suckers out of money but just remember that Karma works harder.

I try to give most games a chance I will watch ads and all just to play a game. But this one is ridiculous, to gain any real progress in this game they want you to start paying real money in the beginning. Are you kidding me, don’t get me wrong as a developer myself I understand the struggles of building up capital when you first start out. But you guys seriously only care about money. Did you put in actual work in terms of building this app? I’m sure you did, but not enough for us to pay real money just to get a start in this game. Get back to the drawing board and come up with a concept that will make people actually want to play the game. Allow progress with our money. IAP should be an option not a requirement. That’s all I have to say.

I’ve never left a review in my life on an app… With that being said - this is the biggest scam I’ve ever seen. I’m a business owner and my husband is a software engineer - specifically we own a PlayStation game company - so I thought this game would be a fun, unique pastime as I’m winding down but still very much thinking about business… WRONG. This is garbage, the grammar is poor, the storyline is hysterical, but to top it all off, you can’t do anything without spending AT LEAST $50 on this game. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life at all the ways they try to get you to spend money on a sub par storyline to say the least… Nice try guys, but you are CLEARLY Silicon Valley rejects trying to make up for lost wages in your own business ventures.

I haven’t spent more than 5 minutes playing and I’m already stopped by a wait time that can’t be reduced by watching ads, but rather by paying money. There is definitely not enough money at the beginning of the game, so you are basically required to buy money if you want to progress. I understand having in game purchases to build capital and all that but this is far past in game purchases. I shouldn’t have to pay to have fun in a game. The game isn’t really even that much anyway so all in all, don’t get this game because it’s a waste of time. The developers need to figure out how to balance revenue and people having fun in game before this game gets any sort of player base.

I’ve been through the 1st scenario 4-5 times and spent as little “cash” in the game as possible and guess what...you still run out of money. (Tell me why I have to pay a designer $20,000 on top of the $15,000/month salary to design blocks for user interface...isn’t that a part of the job you already get paid to do!?) let’s say you’ve decided to build something but then you get to the next screen and can’t afford it. instead of being able to cancel a decision to build something, the game leaves you stranded with 2 options: pay real money or re-start. This is the only review I’ve ever written on a game. It is un-playable without their $4/month subscription.