Start your company

BusinessTycoons is a free online business game run by the team behind BusinessTycoons ("we"). By creating an account and playing you agree to these terms. Write to us at contact@businesstycoons.co.uk.

Your account

• You must be 13 or older.
• One account per person. Several accounts played by one person, or accounts used to help one another, may be closed.
• Keep your password to yourself. Don't share, sell or trade accounts.

Fair play

• Play by hand: no scripts, bots or programs that play for you or load pages automatically.
• Don't use bugs to your advantage. Report them in the forum.
• Game money, shares and goods have no value outside the game. They can't be sold or exchanged for real money, and you may not offer to.

How to behave

This goes for everything others can see: mail, forums, blogs, team shout boxes, and player, secretary, company, building and team names and logos. Names and logos must be suitable for everyone.

• No bullying, harassment, threats or personal attacks.
• No hate against anyone for who they are, no sexual content and no swearing.
• Nothing illegal, and nothing that encourages anyone to harm themselves or others.
• Don't share anyone's personal details, your own included: real names, addresses, phone numbers, photos or social media.
• Don't ask other players to meet up, move to another app, or send you pictures.
• No spam or advertising, and don't pretend to be the game staff or another player.
• Follow the forum rules shown in the forums.

What you write stays yours. By posting it you let us show it in the game.

Reporting and blocking

If something breaks these rules, report it: every message, forum post and blog post, and every player, company, logo and team page has a Report link. Reports go to the game staff, who look at each one; the player you report is not told who reported them. You can also block a player, from their profile or a message they sent: neither of you can then mail or invite the other, and their forum posts are folded away for you. Manage your blocks in Settings.

If you think someone is in danger, or a child is being harmed or approached by an adult, tell the police straight away (999 in an emergency), or report it to CEOP at ceop.police.uk, and report it to us too. We remove illegal content as soon as we know of it and pass it to the police when the law asks us to.

What the staff may do

When something breaks these terms the game staff may remove it, rename a player, company or team, reject a logo, stop a player posting and mailing for a while, reset or close a company, or close an account. Where we can, we tell the player what was done and why, unless that would put someone at risk or help them cheat. The rules of the game, its numbers and these terms may change between rounds.

Complaints and appeals

If you think a report was handled wrongly, or something was done to your account that shouldn't have been, write to contact@businesstycoons.co.uk within 30 days, saying what happened. Someone who did not make the first decision looks at it again where we can, and we aim to answer within 14 days. The same address is for any other complaint about the game, including how we handle reports.

VIP membership

VIP makes the game more convenient; it never makes your company produce more. A VIP day is used each day you have a company in a running round; days you don't use wait for your next company. Prices are shown before you pay, you pay on Stripe's page, and you are paying the team behind BusinessTycoons. We e-mail you a receipt.

VIP is digital content that starts as soon as your payment goes through. When you buy it you ask for it to start straight away, and you accept that you then lose the 14-day right to cancel that consumer law would otherwise give you. If you get your money back, by a refund or by disputing the payment with your bank, the days it bought are taken off your account, as far as you still have them; if a dispute is settled in our favour, they are given back.

Your rights under consumer law are not affected by these terms: if a purchase went wrong or VIP didn't work as described, write to us.

Ending

You can leave at any time. Deactivate your profile in Settings to pause, or delete your account there for good (see the privacy policy). We may close an account that breaks these terms.

The legal part

We do our best to keep the game running and fair, but it comes as it is: a round can be paused, rolled back or reset, and things in the game can be lost. We are not liable for that loss, nor for what other players write. Nothing in these terms limits anything the law doesn't let us limit. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales.

How we handle your data is in the privacy policy.

BusinessTycoons is run by the team behind BusinessTycoons ("we"). We keep as little about you as we can: an e-mail address to sign in with, and what you do in the game. We never ask for your real name, your age, where you live or your phone number. Please don't put them in your names, posts or mail either.

Questions about your data, or a request about it: contact@businesstycoons.co.uk.

What we keep, and why

• Your account: your e-mail address, your password (only as a secure hash, never readable), the player and secretary names you choose, and a two-factor app or passkey if you set one up. We need these to give you an account (the contract between us).
• Your game: your companies, mail, forum and blog posts, the changes you suggest to the wiki, your team, your logo, your settings, the players you block and the reports you send. That is the game itself.
• Security data: the IP address and the network it belongs to, the browser and a device ID when you sign up, sign in, change something important or act in the game. We use them to stop cheating, multiple accounts and abuse, which is in the interest of every player (our legitimate interest). Sign-in records and IP addresses go after 90 days, the log of game actions after 30 days. An address banned for abuse stays on the ban list until the ban ends, and the evidence in a cheating case we are still looking at stays until we decide it.
• Where you came from: when you sign up we note what sent you to the game, such as a search engine, an AI assistant or a forum (the site's address only, not the page you were on), the campaign words in the link you followed, and the first page you opened here. It stays with your account and tells us where players find the game (our legitimate interest). Until you sign up it is held only in your visit's session and goes when that ends; nothing is kept for visitors who don't sign up. If you delete your account, only the name of the source stays, in our sign-up counts.
• Payments: VIP membership is paid on Stripe's own page; your card details never reach us. We keep what you bought, when, the amount and Stripe's reference for it, for six years, because the law asks us to keep accounts.
• E-mail: we write to you about your account (confirming your address, a password reset or account deletion you asked for). We also tell you when a new round starts and how you finished one, unless you untick that when you sign up, and about new mail and your secretary's letters if you turn those on in Settings. Change each in Settings, or stop one with the link in every e-mail. We keep a record of what we sent for 90 days, and stop writing to an address that bounces or marks us as spam.
• Discord: only if you connect your Discord account in Settings, we keep its Discord ID and username, so our bot can give you your roles on our Discord server and show you there by your player name. Discord never tells us your e-mail address. Disconnect it in Settings whenever you like: the bot takes back what it gave you and we forget the account.

Who sees what

Other players see your player name, your companies and logo, your team, and what you post in the forums, blogs and team shout boxes. When the staff put a change you suggested on the wiki, it is thanked by your player name on that page, unless you ask not to be named. Anyone can see the round results on our public results page and front page: the leading and finishing companies' names, their players' names and their Company Value. Your e-mail address is hidden unless you choose to show it in Settings. Mail is seen only by you and the player you write to; the game staff read a message only when it is reported to them, and that reading is logged. The staff see the security data above when they look into cheating or abuse.

Who helps us run the game

The game runs on servers in the European Union (Railway, in Amsterdam). Cloudflare protects the site and stores approved logos; Stripe takes payments; an e-mail delivery service sends our e-mails; Discord runs our chat server. Each of them handles your data only to do that job for us. Where one of them is based outside the UK, the data is protected by the safeguards UK law requires. We never sell your data and show no adverts.

Cookies

Only the cookies the site needs: one keeps you signed in (until you sign up, its session also holds where you came from, see above), one protects the forms from forgery, and one remembers this browser if you tick "Remember me". Your browser also remembers the pages you visited last and how you like the map. There are no tracking, analytics or advertising cookies, so there is nothing to agree to.

Young players

You must be 13 or older to play. We don't ask anyone's age, so everyone gets the same private settings: your e-mail hidden, mail only between players who haven't blocked each other, and nothing about you shared outside the game.

How long we keep it

Your account stays until you delete it. Delete it on the Settings page: your company closes and you are signed out at once, and after 30 days your e-mail address, names, password, mail, blog posts, the words of your forum posts, wiki suggestions not taken, your name on wiki pages, your logo, blocks, sign-in records and security data are erased for good. Signing in before then keeps the account. What stays is the game's history with no way back to you: your companies' results and rankings, and your forum replies as "Removed", under "Deleted player". Payment records stay for the six years the law asks.

Your rights

You may ask for a copy of what we hold about you, have it corrected, deleted or moved, object to how we use it, or ask us to stop using it while we sort something out. Most of it you can change or delete yourself in Settings; for the rest, write to contact@businesstycoons.co.uk and we will answer within a month. If you are unhappy with how we handled your data, you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we say so in the game before it applies. See also the user agreement.