We used to describe what we were making as a series. Six games, one engine, one Britain, built one after another. That is no longer the plan, and this piece has been rewritten to say what the plan is now.
There is one game. It is Business Baron, and there will not be others. The five games we had announced alongside it will not be made. What they were going to cover has not gone anywhere, though. It lives inside Business Baron, as business types you can run in the same towns, in the same years, against the same bank manager as everything else.
Why one game rather than six
Everything that is difficult about a business simulation was always going to be shared. The accounting: double-entry, integer pence, a real profit and loss account, a real balance sheet and a real cash flow statement, reconciling in every period. The tax: real headline UK rules for every year from 1930/31, with the VAT threshold, the marginal relief bands, PAYE and business rates all dated. The places: fifty towns and cities across four nations that do not share a rulebook. The clock, which runs from decimalisation through the three-day week, Big Bang, 1992 and 2008. And determinism: the same seed and the same decisions give the same game.
Once all of that exists, splitting the country into six products starts to look odd. A recession in 1991 should mean the same thing to a builder, a hotelier and a shopkeeper, because it was the same recession. In six games they would each have met it separately. In one game they meet it in the same town, in the same month, and one of them might be you three times over.
So we stopped building walls between them. A hotel is a business type. So is a housebuilder. So is a restaurant, a haulier and a dental practice. Business Baron has more than two hundred business types in total, and they all run on the one engine.
What is free
Business Baron is free to play with five business types:
- Café & Coffee Shop
- Hair & Beauty Salon
- Plumber & Heating Engineer
- E-commerce
- Pub & Bar
There is no time limit. The free game does not stop after a set number of years, and it does not start asking for money halfway through a career. It is the real game with a narrower choice of business, not a cut-down version of the simulation.
We picked those five because between them they cover most of what makes British business hard. A café lives on footfall and a bad January. A salon lives on its staff. A plumber lives on quotes, a van and customers who pay late. An online shop lives on margin, carriage and returns. A pub lives on its licence and the weather.
What the full game adds
£19.99 buys the full game. It is one payment, with no subscription.
The full game opens every business type that is not held in a track: 72 more, which makes 77 in all with the free five. That includes restaurants, takeaways, fine dining and nightclubs, shops of every kind, wholesale and logistics, the trades, farming, manufacturing, education, professional services, fitness and food producers.
Most of what we once described as separate games is simply here. The restaurant ideas are here. The retail ideas are here. They are not a lighter version of what those games would have been, because the parts those games would have shared were always going to be the same parts.
What the tracks are
Four add-on tracks each add a themed set of business types to the full game. Each costs £5.99. A track needs the full game: it adds to it rather than standing on its own.
- The Property & Construction Track adds construction, property and lettings, a scaffolding contractor, a housebuilder, an estate agency, chartered surveyors, an architecture practice and self storage.
- The Hotels & Leisure Track adds hotels and B&Bs, guest houses, holiday parks and campsites, a travel agency, a golf club, a padel and racquet club, a wedding venue, an independent cinema, an escape room and an events company.
- The Health & Care Track adds a private healthcare clinic, care services, a dental practice, a physiotherapy clinic, a care home, a veterinary practice, opticians and a counselling and therapy practice.
- The Technology & Media Track adds software, IT support, a games studio, an app studio, an AI consultancy, a cybersecurity firm, a creative and digital agency, a web design agency, a photography studio, video production, a recording studio, a local newspaper and a podcast and content studio.
Property, construction and hotels were the other three games we had planned. They are tracks now, which means they arrive inside a career you already have rather than as a new game you start from nothing.
What a track does not do is change how the simulation behaves. Nothing you can buy makes the tax kinder, the bank friendlier or the inspector later. A track adds businesses. The rules stay the rules.
It does not end
The old plan talked about careers of forty years. Business Baron no longer has a finishing line.
A career passes from one generation to the next through succession. When a founder hands over, the business goes on, and so does the game. Play never has to stop. Bankruptcy is a severe setback, and it is not the end either.
That changes what you are playing for. There is a public leaderboard that ranks dynasty net worth, jobs created and the best company sale, alongside scores for each of the 24 scenarios. Every player has a profile. A family firm that has survived three generations and two recessions is a different achievement from one founder's good decade, and dynasty net worth is a measure that counts the whole family.
Where it stands
Business Baron is built. It is not released yet, and we are not giving a date. It runs in the web browser, and desktop builds follow later. The site has a waitlist rather than a shop, because we would rather tell you that than take your money early.
Why we care about this
Six games on one engine was a slower way to start and a longer way to finish. One game is more honest about what the engine was always doing, which was simulating one country. The café, the hotel and the building firm share a Britain, a tax year and a bank manager, and now they share a career as well. What you pay for is how much of that Britain you want to run a business in, not whether the simulation underneath is the real one.