The usual arrangement in this genre is that you can play three levels, or one map, or the tutorial, and the interesting systems are behind the purchase. We have not done that, and it is worth explaining why, because the decision costs us something.
Business Baron is free to play with five business types, and there is no time limit. The free version is not a cut-down simulation. It is the game, with a narrower choice of what to run.
What is free
The five business types are:
- Café & Coffee Shop
- Hair & Beauty Salon
- Plumber & Heating Engineer
- E-commerce
- Pub & Bar
You can run any of them for as long as you like. There is no date on which the free game stops, no in-game year at which it locks, and no point in a career where it starts asking.
Those five were not picked at random. They are five quite different shapes of business. A café depends on who walks past and on surviving January. In a salon the staff are the business. A plumber is quotes, a van and customers who take their time paying. An online shop swaps rent for carriage and returns. A pub depends on its licence and on the weather.
The limit is business types, not time
An earlier plan made the free version the whole game for its opening years, and then stopped. We changed it, and the reason is the shape of the game.
A business simulation is about compounding. The first years are about getting one business to survive: cash flow, the first employee, the VAT threshold arriving sooner than you expected. What comes after is what you did with the thing that survived. A time limit cuts the second part off, and the second part is where most of the game is.
That argument got stronger when Business Baron stopped having an end. A career now passes from one generation to the next through succession, and play never has to stop. A clock on a game with no finishing line made less sense than it did before.
So the free game is limited by breadth instead of by length. You get fewer businesses to choose from, and all the time in the world to run them.
Nothing is cut from the simulation
The part people tend not to believe is that the free game is not a lighter version of the paid one.
The five free business types run on the same engine as the other 111. The accounting is the same double-entry ledger, in integer pence, with a real profit and loss account, balance sheet and cash flow statement. The tax is the same set of real headline UK rules, dated by year from 1930/31. The bank manager is the same named person with a memory. The inspector arrives on the same risk rating. The letters come from the same people.
We did it this way for a straightforward reason. A version of a business simulation with the difficult parts taken out does not tell you whether you would enjoy the business simulation. Strip out the tax and the financing and you have removed the thing the game is. Somebody who plays that version has learned nothing useful about whether to pay, and we would rather lose the sale than mislead them into it.
What paying adds
£19.99 buys the full game. It is one payment, and there is no subscription.
The full game opens every business type outside the four add-on tracks: 72 more, which makes 77 in all. Restaurants, takeaways, fine dining, nightclubs, shops, wholesale, logistics, the trades, farming, manufacturing, education, professional services, fitness and food producers are all in it.
The four tracks add themed business types on top: Property & Construction, Hotels & Leisure, Health & Care, and Technology & Media. Each costs £5.99, and each needs the full game.
Buying the full game does not start a different game. It opens more businesses in the one you have been playing. Nothing you can buy changes how the simulation behaves: no purchase makes the tax lower, the bank kinder or the customers more forgiving.
A limit is still a limit
We would rather say the uncomfortable part out loud than have somebody discover it.
A free version with five business types is a commercial mechanism. We are giving you the real game because we think that is the honest way to let you judge it, and we are holding most of the business types back because we would like to be paid for the work. Those two things sit together, and we are not going to dress the second one up as generosity.
It also has a real cost to the player. Five business types is a genuine sample, and it is not everything. If what you want is a haulage yard, a restaurant kitchen or a factory floor, the free game will not show you one. If what you want is a hotel, you need the full game and the Hotels & Leisure Track. You should know that before you start.
What we will say is what the limit does not do:
- It does not run out. There is no clock, in the game or on the wall.
- It does not reduce the depth of any mechanic in the five business types it includes.
- It does not change the rules when you pay.
If you play the free game and decide it is not for you, that is a real answer, and we would rather you reached it than paid for something you did not want.
Where it stands
Business Baron is built and not yet released. There is no date. It runs in the web browser, with desktop builds to follow, and the site has a waitlist rather than a shop for now. When it opens, the free game is how most people will meet it.
Why we care about this
This is our only game, and we want the people who pay for it to have known what they were buying. A free version with nothing taken out of the simulation is the most direct way we know to make that true. What you tried is what you get, with more of Britain open to you.