Was Manager Seo Disposed of as an Industrial Accident?

Seo Sa-hyuk was a game planner who saw players not as people, but as revenue streams. While his colleagues championed immersive storytelling and balanced mechanics, he poured all his energy into monetization—gacha systems, paywalls, and daily log-in traps designed to squeeze every last cent from the user base. Gameplay was an afterthought; profit was the only metric that mattered. But the industry exacts its toll, and Sa-hyuk paid with his health, collapsing from exhaustion at his desk after yet another sleepless night of crunch. When he opens his eyes again, he is no longer in his cramped office. The world around him is achingly familiar—because it is the very game he helped design. Every oppressive mechanic he once coded now governs his new reality: the unforgiving stamina system, the loot boxes that yield nothing but disappointment, the boss fights tuned impossibly high to encourage item purchases. He is no longer the architect but a mere player, trapped in a predatory ecosystem of his own making. The tormentor of gamers has become the tormented. Yet this second chance is not merely punishment—it is a reckoning. Forced to navigate the hellish systems he created, Sa-hyuk begins to see the human cost behind each design decision he once brushed aside. As he struggles to survive in a world that rewards only the deepest pockets, he must confront his past choices and find a way to break the cycle of exploitation. This is not just a story of survival, but of redemption—a fallen planner’s desperate bid to atone, one patch at a time.