Equity & Ego: Startup Story

Start in a garage. Ship products that can flop, manage ambitious people, outplay rival founders, and discover one of 21 company endings.

You have a tiny team, limited runway, and one unreasonable idea.

Equity & Ego is a character-driven startup management game where every week costs money and every success creates a new problem. Choose what to build, decide who should build it, and live with what the company becomes.

BUILD PRODUCTS THAT CAN FAIL

Plan premium games, subscription tools, business software, advertising products, and risky frontier projects. Production spending continues while the clock moves. Team skills, energy, bugs, debugging, demand, reputation, and launch timing decide whether a release becomes dependable income or an expensive mistake.

RUN A REAL PORTFOLIO

Launched products keep their own health, maintenance debt, support costs, reviews, press boosts, weekly income, lifetime revenue, and profit or loss. Repair a struggling product, invest in an update, or sunset it before it consumes the studio.

LEAD PEOPLE, NOT RESOURCE BARS

Hire specialists with different skills, salaries, traits, energy, and morale. Coworkers form bonds, trusted pairs recover together, and unresolved conflict drains the people involved. Employees can request recovery, recognition, mediation, or career development. Keep the promise or risk losing them.

WATCH THE WEEKS PASS

Payroll, rent, debt, production costs, product revenue, market demand, and rival valuations keep moving. Pause for decisions, run at your pace, and track weekly net, monthly burn, runway, ownership, and valuation.

CLIMB FROM GARAGE TO TOWER

Unlock five office locations, more desks, parallel projects, research, equipment, software, and culture upgrades. Larger offices create opportunity, but also increase expectations and burn.

COMPETE WITH FICTIONAL FOUNDERS

Four rival founders pursue their own products and valuations. Their events, grudges, and occasional disasters can create opportunities, reputation damage, or reluctant respect.

COMPLETE MISSIONS AND LEAVE A LEGACY

Follow a ten-chapter Founder Journey, complete rotating side missions and quarterly objectives, earn 36 achievements, and discover 21 company endings. Legacy Points and collected endings remain across future companies.

Play the complete core game offline with no account required. Optional online rankings appear only when a real service is available and the player explicitly joins. The core game has no mandatory advertising. Optional rewarded sponsor spots clearly show the reward before playback and pause company time.

The numbers tell the market what happened. The people remember how you did it.