Games for Executives Don't Exist. We're Building One.

Games for Executives Don't Exist. We're Building One.

There are games for children. Games for teenagers. Games for the eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic that the entire industry optimizes for because they have the most disposable time and the highest tolerance for monetization friction.

There are no games for executives.

Not "easy" games. Not mobile games that fill dead time with dopamine pellets. Not the patronizing "brain training" apps that dress pattern matching in a lab coat. We mean games that engage the specific cognitive skills a senior professional uses every day — operating under uncertainty, delegating to specialists, committing resources against incomplete information, and living with the compounding consequences of decisions made days or weeks ago.

This isn't a niche. It's a demographic of roughly 77 million people worldwide who played strategy games in their twenties and thirties, built careers on exactly the kind of thinking those games exercised, and then aged out — not because they lost the ability or the interest, but because the games industry followed its incentives toward audiences who compete on availability and reflexes rather than judgment and experience.

Why the Category Doesn't Exist

The economics are straightforward. A free-to-play game monetizes through volume. More players, more impressions, more conversion opportunities. This selects for the largest addressable audience, which selects for the lowest common denominator of engagement: quick sessions, immediate feedback, progression systems that reward frequency over depth.

An executive's time is worth more per hour than almost any other demographic's. A managing director billing at $500/hour who spends two hours in your game has donated $1,000 of opportunity cost. If the game charged $15/month, the player is subsidizing the developer's product with 66:1 leverage on their own time. No rational market should produce this outcome, yet every subscription MMO does.

The alternative — charging a price that reflects the value delivered per minute — has been considered commercially suicidal since the industry standardized on $15/month in 2004. A game that charged $50 or $200/month would need to justify that price not through content volume but through decision density. Every minute in the client would need to matter. No filler. No grinding. No busywork designed to stretch thin content across long sessions.

This is hard to build. It is much easier to build a hundred hours of repetitive content than ten minutes of genuinely consequential decision-making. The entire production pipeline of modern games — artists, level designers, quest writers, systems designers — is optimized for volume. Nobody has tooling for density.

So nobody builds it. The executives leave. The industry records this as "older demographics don't play games" rather than "we didn't build what they'd pay for." The category stays empty.

What "Designed for Executives" Actually Means

It does not mean simplified. The ICP for this product has thirty years of experience making complex decisions. They do not need the game to be easier. They need it to be respectful.

Respectful of time means the game delivers its full strategic depth in short sessions. Twenty minutes of high-quality decision-making, not eight hours of accumulation. The competitive advantage is judgment quality, not hours invested. A player who logs in twice a day for fifteen minutes and thinks about the game during their commute should outperform a player who stares at the screen for six hours making mediocre decisions.

This requires a game that runs without you. Not in the trivial sense of idle games that increment a number while you're away. In the sense that a living system continues to evolve — other players act, physics simulates, your crew executes your standing orders, consequences compound — and when you return, the strategic landscape has shifted in ways that demand fresh assessment. The value of your session is the quality of your response to a situation you didn't fully predict.

Respectful of intelligence means real systems, not abstractions that pretend to be systems. When we say orbital mechanics, we mean Newtonian gravity, patched conics, and Hohmann transfer calculations. When we say economics, we mean fuel prices that vary by location because the actual cost of delivering hydrogen from Jupiter's moons to Mars orbit is a function of transit distance, fuel consumption, and local supply. When we say combat, we mean projectiles with mass and velocity that obey conservation of momentum, not hit points and damage dice.

The executive who spent twenty years managing P&L statements, supply chains, or portfolio risk does not need the game to explain that buying fuel cheap at the source and selling it expensive at the destination is profitable. They need the game to model the logistics honestly enough that their professional intuition applies. If the fuel price differential is 2 credits/kg at Jupiter and 10 credits/kg at Mars, the executive asks: what's the transit cost, what's the capital lockup, what's the piracy risk, and what's my margin after fuel consumed in transit? That mental model transfers directly. The game doesn't teach them economics. The game gives them an economy worth thinking about.

Respectful of experience means the interface matches how they already work. Senior professionals do not operate through direct manipulation. They operate through people. They define intent, set constraints, delegate execution, and review outcomes. The interface for a game designed for executives should look like a briefing, not a cockpit. Natural language, not hotkeys. An executive officer who summarizes the situation and presents options, not a heads-up display that demands continuous visual attention.

And respectful of money means the price is honest. The subscription reflects the value delivered, not the industry standard. No microtransactions, no battle passes, no cosmetic stores, no loot boxes. One price. Full access. The business model is: we charge what the experience is worth to people who value their time at professional rates, and we deliver accordingly.

The Bet

The bet is that 77 million lapsed strategic gamers include a meaningful segment willing to pay premium prices for entertainment that treats them like the professionals they are. That the right price isn't $15/month for unlimited time — it's $49/month for twenty minutes a day that are genuinely worth thinking about. That the market failure isn't demand, it's supply.

We could be wrong. Maybe executives don't want this. Maybe the skills transfer doesn't work. Maybe twenty years away from gaming means they've moved on permanently.

But when we describe the product — you command a ship through natural language, your crew handles execution, the physics are real, the economy is real, you compete on judgment not hours — the response from this demographic is not polite interest. It's recognition. It's "I've been waiting for this." It's a global tax strategist in New York liking the LinkedIn post in under sixty seconds.

The category doesn't exist yet. We think that's a supply problem, not a demand problem.

*Marita Online. Closed beta Q2 2026.