Flexport released a video game. This is a real sentence. Flexport, the company that has spent the last three years laying people off in rotating twenty percent increments like a shrinking nesting doll, has released a tycoon-style strategy game in which you, the player, build a global shipping empire from a single cargo vessel to world domination. You begin as a “Dockside Trader.” You end, if you are good at the game, as a “Global Titan.” The game takes thirty simulated years. In real life, Flexport has been around for thirteen and has not yet turned a consistent profit. But sure. Let’s make a game about it.

I played it. I have notes.

The premise is simple and, if you ignore everything that has happened at Flexport since approximately 2022, kind of charming. You inherit one ship. You establish shipping lanes. You grow your fleet. You navigate volatile commodity markets, outsmart rivals, and make high-stakes decisions that define your company’s future. This is, I want to be clear, the description of a video game and not the pitch deck Ryan Petersen presented to Andreessen Horowitz before raising $935 million at an eight billion dollar valuation. Though I understand the confusion.

The game has “Volatile Global Markets” as a feature. Prices fluctuate based on world events and your own actions. You exploit shortages. You capitalize on booms. What the game does not appear to have is a scenario where your revenue drops seventy percent in six months because the freight market collapsed and you hired as though it never would. That would be a more realistic simulation, but admittedly less fun to play.

There is no button in this game that says “Hire CEO From Amazon.” There is no mechanic where you bring in an outside executive who spends three hundred million dollars in six months building a logistics network designed to rival Amazon’s fulfillment operation, and then you fire him a year later and he writes a long post on X about how the company lacked financial discipline when he arrived. There is no cutscene where you, the founder, fire eleven senior executives in a single week and rescind dozens of job offers from people who were supposed to start in three days. This is not a feature of the game. In the game, apparently, decisions have stable outcomes. In real life, decisions at Flexport have the half-life of a fruit fly.

The game lets you buy and lease vessels from a global marketplace. What it does not let you do, as far as I can tell, is buy the corpse of a dead competitor for parts. In November 2023, Flexport purchased the assets of Convoy, a trucking software company that had been valued at over a billion dollars and then just ceased to exist several weeks earlier. In the game, your rivals are entities you outsmart. In real life, your rivals sometimes simply die and you pick through their remains for useful technology. That would be a dark expansion pack, but it would be accurate.

The Ranking Problem

I want to talk about the title system. In the game, you progress from Dockside Trader through a series of escalating ranks until you become a Global Titan based on your final profit after thirty years. This is aspirational. This is the game telling you that if you make smart decisions over three decades, you will be rewarded with status and recognition. In reality, Flexport’s valuation went from eight billion dollars to roughly three point eight billion in about two years, which in the game’s ranking system would be less “Global Titan” and more “Guy Who Used To Be A Global Titan And Would Prefer You Remember That Era.” Shopify’s investment in the company went from being worth eight hundred and thirty eight million dollars in mid-2023 to six hundred and forty two million by the end of 2024. That is not a progression system. That is the opposite of a progression system. That is the ranking going backward.

The game does not include a warehouse mechanic where you lease 5.2 million square feet of space and then most of it sits empty because demand didn’t materialize the way your forecasting model suggested it would. There is no notification that pops up saying “Your landlord is questioning your financials.” In September 2023, a landlord for a planned Flexport facility reportedly queried the company’s financial position. This is the logistics equivalent of your banker calling to ask how things are going, except the question is not casual and nobody is making small talk.

No Layoff Button

There is no layoff button. I want to be very specific about this. In a game about building a logistics empire, there is no button that says “Cut twenty percent of your workforce.” There is no screen where you do this in January and then do it again in October and then do it again the following January. There is no sequence where you start with roughly 3,500 employees and end up with something closer to 2,000 in barely eighteen months while simultaneously telling investors you will be profitable by the end of next year. The game lets you grow. It does not appear to let you shrink. This is generous. This is charitable. This is, frankly, a fantasy.

The “volatile global markets” feature in the game creates scenarios where commodity prices fluctuate and you must adapt. This is fun in a game. In real life, Flexport’s gross revenue hit five billion dollars in 2022, then the freight market cratered and revenue fell to $1.6 billion in 2023 before climbing back to $2.1 billion in 2024. The game simulates volatility as something you master. Real volatility is something that happened to Flexport the way weather happens to a tent.

I will say this for the game: it does not have a social media feature where your CEO goes on television constantly during a period of trade uncertainty and people on the internet speculate about whether the appearances are actually a prolonged investor pitch disguised as thought leadership. It does not have a mechanic where one of your biggest investors publicly marks down the value of their stake in you every quarter. It does not include a scenario where an industry publication runs a headline that says your losses are mounting again and your paper value is dropping again, with the parenthetical “again” doing a lot of work.

Winning and Losing

The game is free. You can play it in a browser. It says the average session is about half an hour. In half an hour of playing the Flexport video game, you can go from owning one ship to dominating global trade routes. In half an hour of reading actual Flexport coverage over the last three years, you can go from “this company is going to disrupt global logistics” to “this company is laying off everyone again” to “this company is on TIME’s 100 Most Influential list” to “this company’s losses are mounting again” and somehow all of these things are true simultaneously about the same company in the same period of time. The game is simpler. The game makes sense. The game has a clear progression from small to big. Real life at Flexport is more like playing a tycoon game where you are somehow winning and losing at the same time, where you keep getting achievements while your score goes down, where the game congratulates you for being influential while your bank account disagrees.

I don’t think Flexport is going bankrupt. I want to state this clearly because every time you write something even mildly critical about Flexport, someone in the comments says “so you’re saying they’re going bankrupt?” and no, that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that a company that has raised $2.7 billion, burned through it at a pace that alarmed its own board, fired most of its employees at least once, changed CEOs in what can only be described as a hostile vibe shift, watched its valuation get cut in half, missed its own profitability targets, and had a landlord publicly question whether it could pay rent, has now released a video game in which you, the player, experience none of these things. The game is about building an empire. The game is about growth. The game is about reaching the top. The game is, in other words, about everything Flexport would like to be true and almost nothing that actually has been.

Sometimes you need to build the world you want to live in. Even if that world is a browser game on itch.io where nobody gets fired and the revenue only goes in one direction.

I give it four stars. The UI is clean. The shipping lanes are satisfying. And honestly, if I had lived through what Flexport has lived through since 2022, I too would release a game where everything goes right and the only direction is up.