Highly complex learning environments in experiential entrepreneurship education, e.g., business simulation games, place substantial cognitive demands on learners, which may lead to cognitive overload, reduced motivation, and ineffective early gameplay experiences. Although pretraining has been established as an effective instructional support strategy in multimedia learning, existing implementations in game-based contexts are often limited to passive information delivery. At the same time, advances in immersive virtual world technologies enable embodied and interactive forms of learning that may support both cognitive and motivational readiness prior to gameplay but can simultaneously introduce additional cognitive demands for learners. Adopting an Action Design Research approach, theory-informed and context-specific challenges emerging in early gameplay were analyzed to derive meta-requirements and design principles for immersive game-based pretraining. These principles were instantiated and iteratively refined within an immersive virtual pretraining environment. The artifact was evaluated with student teachers in an exploratory setting and subsequently deployed in a large-scale field study with actual users of a business simulation game. As a result, the study contributes a set of theoretically grounded and actionable design principles for immersive pretraining in complex simulation-based learning environments and presents a contextually instantiated artifact. The findings also provide descriptive insights into learners’ perception of cognitive and motivational readiness and highlight both the promises and the potential pitfalls of immersive pretraining for subsequent business simulation gameplay.