I was interested in the premise of this game and generally like management and tycoon games. However, this is a very poor example of the genre.
The "simulation" tag is laughable, and while I'm willing to forgive some simplifications for the sake of game mechanics, the simplifications in Startup Company are just laziness from the developers that don't pay off in game mechanics. The only revenue model is to build websites and either put advertising on them or sell subscriptions. This makes more sense for some website types (streaming service, video sharing, social media) than others (shopping). Websites are made of features. Most features, IIRC called "basic features", are interchangeable: for each level of each basic feature, your website can support more users. (Not in the sense of being more scalable or anything; there are completely separate game mechanics for that.) If one "basic feature" is at a higher level than a different one, user satisfaction goes down (even--especially--if you're just adding a new feature). Features are made of interchangeable "components" and "modules" that are produced by designers, developers, and "lead developers" (a totally separate category from "developers" regardless of the experience mechanic). Components and modules can also be bought and sold in outsourcing contracts. Advertising and subscription features don't require any development work (my full time job used to be software development for an advertising feature but whatever). You can build a feature called "payment methods" or something, but aside from being yet another completely interchangeable feature, it has no effect on revenue. Apparently, my billion dollar streaming service can have a subscription feature without the payments feature, and my shopping website has a payments feature (presumably for buyers to pay sellers) that I, unlike every shopping website ever built, never actually take a cut from. Total nonsense.
The game also has a serious lack of UI/QoL polish. If I want to copy a set of racks in the datacenter, I have to copy each rack individually--there's no bulk copy and paste, even though for many of the advanced server types, you sometimes need a set of 6 racks to keep a balanced ratio. This would also have been useful for office layouts, at least if my employees didn't all have their own idiosyncratic desk preferences. ("I demand a Basic Desk! I will be UNHAPPY and WORK SLOWER if you give me a slightly nicer Intermediate Desk!") Even selecting objects in either the office or the datacenter by clicking on them is pointlessly difficult if there are other objects in the way. Numeric input fields are horrendous to use. For instance, for your sales executives, you can have them search for leads based on a range of impressions you want to sell. If you type a new number into the "maximum" field, like 2,000,000, as soon as you type "2" it instantly assumes that your maximum is 2 impressions and if you've already set your minimum to 1,800,000 impressions, it just deletes it. This would be a minor annoyance, except if your website is growing, the main gameplay loop requires going back and telling each of your sales executives, individually, how many impressions they should try to sell. Numeric input fields in general also have an annoying UI bug where leading zeroes tend to show up out of nowhere.
Another commonly annoying gameplay loop: when promoting an employee (from beginner -> intermediate -> expert), sometimes that employee will take that opportunity to demand a nicer desk than they had before. This is fine, except if I buy a new desk, unassign them from their current desk, and assign them to their new desk, that unassigns both their own manager and any other employees that they might be managing.
I've alluded to the feature where each employee has certain preferences about what desk they want, and this extends to what benefits they're interested in and what things they'd like to have in the office (eg ping pong table or coffee machine), but the only way to see this information is to click on each employee profile individually and select a specific tab. A good management game would aggregate this information somewhere.
The worst part was at the end of my career, when I was ready to retire and wanted to sell my billion dollar streaming service and spend a couple of years gradually feeding the rest of my wealth into my retirement fund (the game has a simulated tax system that punishes you for doing it all at once). For each of my hundreds (probably over 1,000 total) of rack-mounted servers and rack coolers that I needed to liquidate, I had to click "sell" and then go through a confirmation dialog. I would have killed for that terrible, buggy numeric input field if it meant not having to click "sell" and hit enter a thousand times.
Time management is also annoying. Everything gets dark when it's nighttime, so if I'm trying to rearrange the office or datacenter, I have to basically stop every single night because I can't see a thing. I could pause the game and do this stuff during daylight, and I usually did, but the game is basically a "wait for things to happen simulator" so pausing the game at any point feels like a waste of time. Especially because it doesn't fast-forward very fast at all. The worst part is that I actually kind of like the Sims-esque "rearrange the office and datacenter to look nice" dollhouse mechanic when it's done well (i.e. not in Startup Company).
But honestly, the worst part of the game isn't the crappy QoL. It's that, without crappy QoL, there wouldn't be a game. When I'm playing this kind of game, I like make decisions, observe how they play out, and make adjustments. This game has very few decisions. Deciding what kind of website you want to build barely matters: the only difference is which features it can have. Deciding which features to build barely matters, because most of them behave exactly the same. You have to level up all of the features more or less in sync--there's no decision about priority. And the only thing you get from leveling up a feature is that your website can support more users. Your existing users never get happier that the existing features improve, they only get angry at you if some features improve significantly faster than the others. God forbid you add a new feature at level 1 when your existing features are at level 100. Likewise, having to micro all of your advertising deals over and over again as your website grows gives the player something to do, in the same sense that having an itchy arm gives you something to do by scratching it.
The game is pretty much a loop of waiting for things to happen and then making an excessive number of clicks to do the same things over and over again. The "simulation" tag is laughable, but there is exactly one immersive thing about this game. The object of the game is to build a website that attracts as many users as possible for the lowest amount of effort, annoying them as much as you can get away with. This is clearly Hovgaard Games' philosophy of game development.
