During the first week of supermarket management and satirical life sim Discounty, a woman named Grace shows players the ropes of working at the local Discounty to the satisfaction of its owner, your Aunt Tellar. Grace is a good worker and a great trainer. Her onboarding process, which is effectively the game’s tutorial, sets players up well to run the shop on their own. She doesn’t throw you into the deep end, but lets you adjust to the temperature and breathe as she guides you towards it. Her guidance is what allowed me to run a profitable business, one that could expand in size twice by the time credits roll. A business that could swallow both the abandoned tea house and the decaying home of long-dead town “hero” John Key in the process, which would piss off the residents enough to boycott the store briefly. A business that could still open in the face of that small town’s boycott with a coldness first shown when Aunt Tellar fired Grace.

I was surprised at my own shock when Aunt Tellar told me she cut Grace. Not necessarily at Aunt Tellar’s choice — she had already revealed herself to be ready and willing to do whatever it takes for business growth. It was the real sense of loss that hit me. For six in-game days, Grace had slowly become a part of my routine, which also made her a part of my comfort. She was a welcomed sight when I entered the store at 8:00 a.m. to check inventory and ensure things were on track to fulfill customer needs, bringing an aura with her that almost felt like its own energy booster. There was no indication that Grace would go anywhere. Unless, unlike me, the game’s whimsical music, bright colors, and bouncy pixel art don’t initially distract you from remembering a common denominator in many company success stories: workers getting the short end of the stick. It’s a lesson as old as time and somehow more relevant than ever. Discounty’s rise in Blomkest would turn out to be no exception.

Discounty weaves together several mini-storylines to show how growth under capitalism is frequently at odds with the well-being of communities and their history, but Grace’s firing is a punch to the throat as far as tone-setting goes. It’s a move that reminds the players what the game is: you’re not starting a store from ground zero with nothing but a dream and a scrappy team of overachievers, but instead getting someone else rich by becoming the latest extension of an already big business. And if a business wants to get rich quicker, minimizing cost is step one. 

Discounty makes Grace’s loss constantly felt too. It’d be one thing if all I felt was the initial hurt from walking into an empty store one morning and hearing silence where a good morning should’ve sang. What made that hurt continue was seeing Grace wander Blomkest thereafter, amputated from function and routine unlike the other residents. She was like a ghost — effectively a haunting reminder of not only what’s considered necessary to upscale a business, but also that profitable businesses have no problem leaving behind those who built them up in the first place.  

The parallels with larger U.S. society’s current moment are hard to ignore. There’s no need to look any farther than this past July, a month that started with headlines about mass layoffs at Microsoft and ended with reports of the same company’s strong 2025 fiscal year. Let it not be forgotten that this is the fourth mass layoff at Microsoft in less than two years, all of them following the company’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October 2023. For the games sector overall, the last few years have featured a disgusting amount of stories where workers are rewarded with instability and a job hunt after making a big business bigger. Even the few exceptions you can find of companies giving back to their employees are hard to enjoy. Those exceptions just further highlight that the rest were choices, not necessities. 

Discounty is (mostly) not a game with a branching narrative, so I couldn’t do what I wanted to do and tell Aunt Tellar there was no Discounty without Grace. Instead, the ensuing story only further showed how this game can mirror reality since, as Shopkeer, I did what most people end up doing in this situation: I went to work. I did everything Grace taught me, thinking about why I was here and she wasn’t for the entire shift. By the time I closed shop and went home, feeling more deflated than one usually does when a game drops the overt handholding, I had learned the most important lesson the tutorial had: Discounty was going to be no different from any other success story. It would do what it needed to get bigger, including lose Grace. And it was going to leave a lump in your throat.