AI is coming to take my job, so I’d better start looking for a new one. Luckily, there are a ton of job simulators on Steam, and I’m going to play as many as I can until I find my next career. This week’s job: Gun Store Simulator, an early access sim about running a gun store.
America has a gun problem, and the problem is this: with roughly 400 million privately-owned firearms in the United States, how am I going to sell people even more guns? There are already more firearms than humans in this country: that’s what you call market saturation.
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Nope. Not even a little bit. I buy shelves, stock ’em with knuckle dusters and baseball bats, and open the doors. People wander in, march robotically to the shelves, grab a small stack of non-guns, and come to the counter eagerly holding out a credit card or cash. I take their money, give them change, and they leave with a big camouflaged bag containing zero guns—but with zero complaints.
Maybe I’m actually doing something good here by not selling people guns. Instead of the local citizens settling their minor disputes by firing wildly at each other, they’ll have to resort to beating each others’ heads in and pulverizing each other’s faces. After all, you can’t punch someone from across the street or from inside a moving car: you really have to get up close to harm them. Maybe that’s how violence should be in this town: deeply personal.
I decide right then and there that I won’t sell guns from my gun store, not ever, not even when the gun license becomes available. Heck, I won’t even sell knives because you can throw a knife at someone from a distance. Not personal enough! Bludgeoning will be my stock and trade. If I could rename my store—and that should really be a basic feature of a store sim, by the way—I’d call it the Blunt Hut.
My gun control strategy seems to be working. I give up selling bats quickly: they’re too cheap and take up too much space, but becoming a 100% knucks business lets me quickly earn enough to hire a guy in camo pants named Jackson to work the register. All I have to do now is order more knucks and stock the shelves, because there’s quite literally nothing else to do in this early access sim. Even when I level up enough to buy a gun license, I just keep selling my knucks, row after gleaming row of them.
Something I should mention because it becomes a fixation for me: each order of brass knuckles comes in a small wooden crate, and every time I empty a crate I drop it on the floor of my shop. I assumed that these crates would be magically cleaned up by the next morning, because surely the game wouldn’t let me accumulate dozens and dozens of physics objects for no reason.
But it does. The crates just lie there, the pile growing every day. There’s a dumpster outside I can drop them in to dispose of them, but at this point I want to see how many empty crates I can collect.
While I’m turning a nice profit from my brass knuckle business, progress is a bit slow. I can mark my knucks up to about double their actual value, but each time I use the computer to place an order my eye is drawn to the other weapon I’m allowed to purchase at early levels: the knife. It’s hard to ignore just how expensive they are: a knife costs $58, while knucks only cost $17. If I can jackknife the price of knives way up, same as I do with my dusters, I could really be rolling in it.
Reluctantly, I give it a try. I buy one shelf and set it way across the other side of the store, as if the added distance will somehow lessen my guilt for betraying my “blunt damage only” promise. And sure enough, I can crank the cost of knives through the roof and people will still happily buy them. I raise the price to $75, then $100, and then $115. My customers don’t even blink (probably because they can’t blink because they are mindless, soulless weapon-buying automatons).
Despite my misgivings, my knife business does so well that I can afford a clone of Jackson the Camo Cashier to stand behind a second register in my store, and I can spend $10,000 on an addition to my shop: the shooting range. I know what you’re thinking because I had the same question: can I open a gun range even if I don’t have any guns for sale? That’s exactly why I spent all that money, to find out.
The answer is yes, I can open a shooting range. Unfortunately, and I guess I should have seen this coming, but the customers of my gun range want guns. They state it very plainly. “Picture Of A Gun,” my first visitor says in a large word bubble.
There’s no option to let him beat, punch, or stab a paper target, so I just leave him there, forever requesting a gun he shall never receive.
Having spent so much on that pointless shooting range, I’m in a financial hole. I can’t restock all those empty knife shelves, and since I notice that customers walk to a specific shelf and then leave the store if there’s nothing on it (they really are completely robotic), I take most of my shelves down to consolidate my limited stabby inventory. I even fire one of the Jackson clones and work the second register for a bit to save money.
But the reversal of fortune doesn’t last long. Nothing can dampen the desire of people to arm themselves with deadly weapons, and even stocking just a few knives quickly puts me back on top. I’m so flush with knife money I even hire a third Jackson clone, who doesn’t even have a register to work so he just stands outside the store staring at a brick wall all day. I’ve got that kind of money.
Then I reach a new level of financial independence. At level five I can purchase hunting items like rifles and .308 ammo—but who cares, because there are now camo hats and backpacks available. Backpacks sell for $115, which I can jack up to well over $200.
No more knives. No more knucks. This is now a backpack shop and they sell so fast I can barely keep the shelves stocked. “Gun Store” has gone completely violence-free and fashion-forward, and the only thing stacked higher than empty crates are my profits.
Performance evaluation
Would I like to be a gun store owner IRL?
Nah. Every time I sold someone a gun I’d be afraid they’d immediately shoot me so they wouldn’t have to pay. That’s too high stress.
Would I make a good gun store owner IRL?
I spent all my money on a gun range despite not having any guns for the customers to use. I’m guessing I’d be bad at this.
Is Gun Store Simulator good?
You can’t go too far wrong with a game where you stock shelves and sell customers stuff. But this is a very basic, no-frills version of that kind of sim, and it’ll have to improve a ton in early access for me to consider recommending it.
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