Pillazon: MMO Drug Lord Tycoon

Pillazon opens with a pitch that's hard not to smile at: you're the new CEO of a small tech company, and your job is to grow it into the world's most successful drug empire, run entirely through a legitimate-looking website. You hire developers to build features, researchers to unlock upgrades, marketers to drive traffic, and — this is the part that separates it from a hundred other office-management sims — hackers and security engineers to attack rival companies and defend your own, plus a small empire of front businesses like a coffee shop to launder the proceeds before the police notice. It's a genuinely funny, well-observed premise for a tycoon game, and several of the earliest Steam reviews say exactly that: "cool idea, something fresh," reads the very first one, posted the day Early Access launched.

A concept better than its foundations

The trouble starts with what that concept sits on top of. A January 2023 review with 17 helpful votes — by far the most-endorsed review this game has ever received — lays out a specific, detailed comparison to Startup Company, an existing and well-known business simulator about building a tech startup. The reviewer describes the resemblance as going well past inspiration: near-identical website "feature" systems, staff roles with names close enough to the original to be recognisable, and a progression structure the review calls "shamelessly ripped off" and, in places, worse-executed than the game it's compared to. This review deserves to be reported carefully rather than treated as settled fact — it's one detailed account, not an independent audit — but it's specific enough, and sufficiently endorsed by other players, that any reader considering the purchase should know the comparison exists and go look at both games before deciding. The screenshots on Pillazon's own store page do show an isometric office layout with desks, named staff, and a feature-upgrade tree that would look immediately familiar to anyone who's played business sims in this specific mould.

Underneath the borrowed-or-not structure, several early reviewers found real substance regardless: one calls it "a lot of different mechanics" that reward digging in over time, another with over 10,000 minutes logged says they didn't hit a single serious bug across a long session and would "definitely play again." A few reviewers frame this as their preferred flavour of the genre entirely — trading in game-developer-sim staples for a criminal-enterprise skin over the same office-management bones, and finding that swap genuinely entertaining on its own terms.

Advertised as an MMO, played more like a solo sim

Pillazon's Steam categories list Multi-player, MMO and PvP, and the developer's own description promises zone-capture warfare, DDoS attacks against rival players, and sabotage through targeted research on other companies' investments. On paper, that's a real persistent-world structure layered on top of the tycoon mechanics. In practice, more than one reviewer pushes back on the framing directly. A February 2023 review states it plainly: "it is supposed to be an MMO, and by that the dev means it's basically just another variation of the whole city builder mobile game," and a March 2023 review shortens the same complaint to "basically a mobile game." A January reviewer who otherwise enjoyed the game asks, almost wistfully, for "more PLAYERS please" — a small detail that says more about the size of the actual population than any marketing copy does. None of this means the PvP systems don't technically function; it means the "MMO" label appears to be doing more promotional work than the population on the other end of it can support.

A bug that lands squarely on the wallet

The most concerning single report in the review history is dated August 2023, seven months after launch: a player describes opening the game's microtransaction menu, selecting a purchase option, and then cancelling it — at which point the game reportedly becomes unplayable. The reviewer calls it, bluntly, some of the worst coding they've encountered on Steam. This is a different category of problem from ordinary Early Access rough edges. It sits directly in the real-money purchase flow, and because the developer's news feed shows no posts after January 2023, there's no public record of it ever having been addressed. A separate January 2023 review flags a related concern about the currency design itself, calling the premium currency a "gem style currency" and objecting, on principle, to an indie game purchase not feeling fully owned once a secondary currency and its associated purchases enter the picture.

The silence since January 2023

The clearest single fact in this whole review is also the easiest to verify directly: Pillazon's official Steam news feed contains thirteen posts, starting with a closed-beta announcement on 11 November 2022 and ending with a patch on 26 January 2023. Between those dates the developer shipped genuinely fast — hotfixes within a day of the closed beta starting, a launch postponement announced transparently in December, and several numbered patches across the first two weeks after the 13 January Early Access launch. Then, as far as any public record shows, nothing. The store page still displays the "Early Access Game" banner today, more than three and a half years after entry, with no 1.0 release, no further patch notes, and — per the last two dated reviews in the sample, from June and August 2023 and a single outlier from August 2024 — no evidence any later player found the experience meaningfully different from what shipped in that first fortnight.

Final verdict

Pillazon had a real hook: a legitimately funny, well-constructed premise for a tycoon game, a developer who showed up daily during the opening weeks, and enough systems depth that some early players got real hours out of it. But a credible, specific comparison to an existing business sim raises real questions about how much of that structure is actually original, a purchase-flow bug went unresolved as far as any public record shows, and the developer's own update history confirms that whatever momentum existed lasted exactly two weeks before stopping entirely. Three and a half years in Early Access with a static feed is no longer a work in progress — it reads as an abandoned one. The premise alone might be worth NZ$7.39 to the specifically curious, but this isn't a purchase this review can recommend in good conscience today.