STARTUPEMPIRE

One city · One order book · No pause button

Your rivals
don't log off.

A free browser business sim: one shared city, 179 products, a live stock exchange, and twelve rival corporations that keep building and trading at one game day every ten seconds.

$500,000 starting capital · free in any browser · no download
There is no payment system in the game. Nothing to buy, nothing to pay to catch up.

  • 179products, 151 with real input recipes
  • 14industry sectors, farm to finance
  • 12rival corporations, always running
  • 1 hr = 1 yrone real hour is one fiscal year

The clock

The city kept moving.

That sentence is not marketing. It is the first thing the game says to you when you come back — followed by exactly how many days you missed.

One tick is one game day, and a tick lands every ten seconds. The tick engine runs on the server whether anybody is connected or not, so nothing waits for you: businesses produce, prices move, the AI corporations act, and your last limit order sits on the book exactly where you left it.

The world news feed, showing a supply-chain rally, a corporate liquidity crunch and a morning market briefing with GDP, interest rate and a sector-by-sector outlook.
The isometric city: streets, shops, factories and a working harbour, with traffic on the roads.

The city

One map. Every business on it is somebody's.

Pedestrians walk the sidewalks and traffic runs the roads, and the density is driven by real economic activity — a busy commercial block teems, a closed shop generates nothing at all. Twelve kinds of finite resource sit under the ground and deplete as they are worked. Roads extend as the city builds out.

The competition

Eleven archetypes. Twelve corporations.
None of them are scenery.

They buy land, staff their floors, cut prices, list on the exchange, short what they think is overvalued, and bid for companies they want. They act every fifth tick, staggered per company, so you cannot time them.

MegaCorp Industries

MEGA

Opens before the numbers say it should. It moves on daylight, not on proof.

Aggressive expansionist

ValueFirst Manufacturing

VFST

Runs the thinnest cost base in the city and prices under you until your margin is gone.

Cost minimizer

NovaTech Solutions

NOVA

Out-researches you first, then beats you on the quality half of the rating.

Tech innovator

Dominion Holdings

DOMN

Buys energy, finance, real estate and media until a sector has one seller left.

Monopoly builder

Apex Capital Group

APEX

Doesn't build. Buys.

Financial raider

Prestige Brands Int'l

PRSTG

Charges more than you and still takes the demand.

Luxury strategist

Fixed Income Capital

FIXD

Lends, collects, compounds. In the world we photographed for this page, it was ranked first.

Bond king

Bearish Capital Mgmt

BEAR

Sells your stock before it owns any.

Short shark

Omni Industries

OMNI

Collects companies across sectors and calls it strategy.

Conglomerate builder

Ironclad Defense Systems

IRON

Owns the one sector nobody else wants badly enough.

Defense contractor

Solaris Clean Energy

SOLR

Pays up for talent, then owns the grid.

Green energy

Twelve corporations are dealt across those eleven archetypes at world start, and the world respawns entrants to keep the field full. If one of them dies, another one is already coming.

Stakes

Four ways to lose your company.

None of these are cutscenes. All four are rules the simulation runs every tick.

01

The price war

A rival does not grow your market. When a second seller enters your product's demand pool, total demand rises by 25% — the rest is taken off you, split by a weighted blend of quality, price and brand whose mix differs product by product.

02

The short

Go public and your ticker becomes a target. Short selling, margin and bonds are all live, and one archetype exists to do nothing else.

03

The tender offer

Anyone holding 5% of your shares can open a hostile tender at a 10% to 100% premium. They must escrow 100% of the bid in cash first — no paper bids — then a 40-tick window runs. At 50.1%, the company is theirs.

04

The regulator

The SEC watches insider trading and manipulation. The IRS audits and reclaims back taxes. Antitrust opens above 40% share of a sector. Win too hard and the case is yours.

Supply

Own the chain and the price war is somebody else's problem.

179 products, 151 of them with real input recipes across 14 sectors. Buy your inputs on the open market and a rival can squeeze you. Make them yourself and they can't.

Recipe — food

WheatFlourBread

Recipe — heavy industry

Iron oreCoalSteelCar partsAutomobiles

Both of those are literal recipes in the product table, not illustrations.

The supply price screen: raw grain, ore, oil, lumber, chemicals and building materials, each with price, supply, demand and a demand-to-supply ratio.
Wholesale prices, demand and supply move every game day. Your suppliers can be your own buildings or a rival who has agreed to sell to you — and the list only shows sellers the link will actually draw from.

The exchange

A real order book, not a buy button.

One shared exchange. Price-time priority, partial fills, ten levels of visible depth, and a spread you have to cross or wait out. Take a company public and it lists here for everyone.

IPOs have real listing gates — ten employees and fifty thousand in assets before you can ring the bell. After that: dividends, bonds, margin, short selling, and anybody with 5% of your stock able to come for the rest of it.

The order book: three ask levels, the spread at two percent, the last traded price, and three bid levels with share counts and order counts.
The order ticket: buy or sell, limit or market, a limit price, a share count, the estimated total, and the best bid and ask.

Price-time priority.

One shared book per public company, with partial fills. Your limit order queues behind the one that got there first, at the price it got there at.

Shares cannot be conjured.

Every portfolio, plus the market maker's inventory, minus every open short, must equal shares outstanding. The harness asserts it every tick — 1,500 ticks, zero violations. The market maker can only sell shares it actually holds.

A dropped connection is not a lost move.

Every economic command carries an idempotency key. We killed the production process with SIGKILL after the receipt, after the checkpoint and after the response — the order neither vanished nor charged twice.

The season

Seasons end. The city doesn't.

A growth season runs one real week — 60,480 ticks, which is 168 game years — and it scores wealth gained, not wealth owned.

When it ends there is a one-hour intermission, the top twelve are archived as champions, and the growth baseline resets. Nothing is wiped: your buildings, your companies, your holdings and your position on the map all carry into the next race. You don't start again. You start from wherever you got to, one place further down the list of people who didn't stop.

Lifetime wealth rankings, listing rival corporations by net worth from $10.85M downward.

The world writes its own headlines.

Seven categories of world news, generated from events that actually happened: a supply squeeze, a liquidity crunch at a named corporation, a competitor opening on your street. There's a morning briefing with GDP, the interest rate and a sector-by-sector outlook, and a ticker along the bottom of the city with live commodity and equity prices.

Headlines from a running world

  • SUPPLY CHAINRefined Fuel Rally Continues as Demand Outpaces Supply
  • CORPORATEMegaCorp Industries 900 Faces Liquidity Crunch as Cash Reserves Dwindle
  • ECONOMICConsumer Spending Surges Amid Economic Boom
  • RETAILPrestige jewelry shop opens in hometown — new competition in Silver Jewelry

Day one

You arrive with $500,000 and a target on your back.

The city is already running when you get there. That's the point — and it's also why the opening is made as easy as we could make it.

Three plans, already configured.

A corner store, a neighbourhood grocer or a fashion boutique — each arrives with its purchase and sales departments already placed in the 3×3 grid, and the boutique with advertising on top. Nothing has to be assembled by hand.

The full price before you spend a dollar.

Pick a lot and the game quotes structure, land and $50,000 of working capital as one number, next to your available cash and what you'd have left. Nothing moves until you confirm.

A reserve nobody can touch.

A failing shop stops trading rather than draw its funder below $100,000. It can lose you a business. It can't lose you the last of your money.

Up to five companies.

Hold property personally, or incorporate, list, pay yourself a salary and a dividend, and use the company's balance sheet to fund the next one.

The opening panel: corner store from $90K, neighbourhood grocer from $170K and fashion boutique from $130K, each plus land, with staff, stock orders and $50K working capital included.

Questions

Before you start.

Is it actually free?

Yes. Free, in a browser, no download. There is no payment system anywhere in the game — no shop, no premium currency, no subscription, nothing to buy and nothing you can pay to catch up with.

Do I need to have played Capitalism Lab?

No. If you have, you'll recognise the demand model immediately and you'll be dangerous inside an hour. If you haven't, you open a corner store, sell snacks, and learn the rest of it by watching what the city does back to you.

Do I have to play every day?

No — but the world doesn't wait. One game day lands every ten seconds whether you're there or not, your businesses keep operating, and the AI corporations keep acting. There's no daily bonus to miss and nothing to collect for showing up. What you miss is time, and time is the only thing anyone here is actually competing for.

What happens while I'm offline?

Your businesses keep producing and selling, your orders stay on the book, prices move and rivals act. When you come back the game opens with a briefing: how many game days passed, and how your empire value and personal cash changed over them.

Am I playing against people or against AI?

Both, in one world. Twelve rival corporations run continuously from eleven behavioural archetypes, and every human in the world trades on the same order book and competes for the same customers in the same demand pools.

Can somebody actually take my company?

Only if you take it public. Anyone holding 5% of your shares can open a hostile tender offer at a 10–100% premium with 100% of the bid escrowed in cash, a 40-tick window to decide, and control at 50.1%. Stay private and nobody can bid. Go public and you get liquidity, an IPO valuation, and a permanent risk that somebody wants your chair.

How hard is it to start?

Three plans arrive pre-configured, and the game quotes the entire opening cost — structure, land and working capital — before any money moves. There's no tutorial and no quest chain: there's a pre-configured plan, an itemised quote, a protected reserve, and a business list that sorts itself by whatever is about to go wrong.

What do I actually do in the first ten minutes?

Pick one of the three plans, choose a lot on the map, read the quote, and confirm it. Your shop gets built, staffed and stocked, and starts selling. After that: set your pricing, watch what the demand split does to your margin, collect surplus cash when it builds up — and open the exchange to see what the twelve corporations are worth.

The city is open for business

Small beginnings. Big ambitions.

$500,000, one shared city, and twelve corporations who were already here when you arrived.

Free in any browser · no download · nothing to buy