CRUNCH vs Burn Rate

Build the empire. Keep the receipts. CRUNCH is a dark, cutthroat studio-management tycoon. You start alone in a 1982 garage with a little cash and a lot of nerve — and claw your way to a game-industry empire across fifty brutal years. Make games. Make money. Make enemies. DESIGN GAMES THAT MATTER (OR SELL) Pick a topic, a genre, and a platform, then steer three stages of development across nine craft fields. Balance design against technology, match your focus to what the genre demands, squash the bugs you can afford to, and ship it — then watch four critics decide your fate in real time. BUILD A TEAM. THEN MIND IT. Hire programmers, artists, designers, and writers, each with their own talent, traits, and breaking point. Crunch buys speed and costs souls. Push too hard and your best people burn out and walk — straight into a rival's open door. SURVIVE THE INDUSTRY Predatory publishers. A venture capitalist whose money is a leash. Lawsuits, leaks, scandals, console wars, and a charismatic rival who considers your existence a rounding error. Eighty-plus events force real trade-offs: money or morale, reputation or quality, your integrity or your survival. GROW AN EMPIRE Research new genres and engine features. Move out of the garage, into a studio floor, a tower, a campus. Build your own console. Launch a live-service operation the players never leave. Forty fictional platforms rise and fall across six eras of an industry that eats its own. EVERY CHOICE IS A TRADE An authored story with a cast you'll grow attached to — and multiple endings. The empire. The acquisition. The cult legend. The reckoning. The landfill. How you get there is up to you, and it costs something either way. - 14 genres, 44 topics, 40 platforms across 6 eras - A deep research tree, your own console, and live-service late game - 80+ branching events and a multi-act story with several endings - Sign in with Apple to sync your studio across devices via iCloud — or play as a guest - Designed for iPhone and iPad, with a clean, dark, native interface - No ads. No tracking. No third-party servers. Built in a garage. Like everything else worth keeping.

Start with a used laptop and a handful of AI agents. Turn your own ideas into products, ship updates, grow recurring revenue, and keep the company alive while compute, upkeep, and marketing eat into your runway. Build specialized agent teams for planning, coding, review, and shipping. Reallocate them as projects change. Upgrade from secondhand machines to cloud GPU fleets and eventually your own data centers. Products keep earning after launch—and keep evolving. Improve quality, reliability, and demand over time, enter recurring hackathons, react to startup surprises, negotiate acquisition offers, and collect event stickers for your founder laptop. Burn Rate is an agentic startup simulation about making smart tradeoffs between speed, quality, cost, and ambition. Build agents. Ship products. Beat the burn.