Being a CEO is hard, what if you don’t maximize shareholder value? I created a satirical web game where you play as a newly appointed CEO with a singular goal: maximize shareholder value. The gameplay is like “CEO tinder”, inspired by the game Reigns, where you swipe left or right to make binary choices and gameplay progresses based on your decisions. Do try it out and share feedback.
Why? Because I was on a week long medical leave and needed something to do while I was mostly lying on bed.
Play Maximizing Shareholder Value
Game Mechanics
The core mechanic relies on a balancing act. You are constantly presented with trade offs. Do you make the moral and ethical choice, which might be wildly unpopular with your board? Or do you take the safe choice that keeps the lights on but doesn’t move the needle?
A key philosophy built into the game is that you cannot win by playing it safe. Ships are not meant to be safe at the harbour. To actually reach the win state, you have to embrace the high risk, high reward options.
The scenarios run on weighted probabilities. Because your decisions trigger branching story arcs, no two games are exactly the same. Balancing this was a massive challenge. I spent a lot of time fine tuning the probability weights to hit a very specific win rate. The game is supposed to be difficult and unfair, much like the real world systems it parodies.
Under the Hood
On the technical side, I made a very deliberate choice: no server side backend.
The entire game runs client side. Instead of a database, all the scenarios, decisions, and consequences are stored in a Google Sheets CSV. The client fetches this CSV, parses it, and builds the game state dynamically. This makes it incredibly easy for me to add new scenarios or tweak the probabilities on the fly. I just update the Google Sheet and the game updates instantly for everyone.
It is a very lightweight and scrappy architecture, but it works perfectly for a text based game like this.
If the game gets popular, I will write up a much more detailed Dev Log going into the weeds of the code and the Google Sheets integration. Until then, try your hand at being a ruthless CEO and see how long you can survive.