Discussion
gosh who could have predicted that precisely this would happen
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/free-steam-demo-runs-up-usd1-000-daily-ai-bill-and-forces-devs-to-take-out-bank-loan-studio-eyes-local-hardware-models-to-escape-cloud-limits-as-cheaper-automatic-fallback-ai-models-create-problems-game-uses-ai-to-process-your-voice-and-build-responses
archive: https://archive.ph/XsfwS
@davidgerard “Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.”
😇
@davidgerard I feel like there’s a “challenge accepted” dare inserted in here somewhere. 🤣
@davidgerard The new game, "Teach My Little Sister How To Take Out A Bank Loan", forces it's developers to remortgage their houses to pay for said game's tokenmaxxing due to their own stupidity.
"#AI is cheap" they say, huh?
Why couldn't they make the AI an optional feature that requires an external API key that is capable of controlling the game features through an MCP implementation? That'd allow for a local LLM to be used as a fallback.
@davidgerard if 400 players incurs so much infrastructure cost that you have gone negative you do not have a game you have a burn pit for money.
@davidgerard AI gaming following the path trodden by Blockchain games before it, 'If we make the game and absorb colossal losses and pretend it's a success, surely people will keep on using it until it becomes profitable!' Maybe they should pull an Axie Infinity and incorporate rent seeking too, I would also say exploiting the developing world, but it's an AI project, so that's a given.
@davidgerard We're on the dumbest timeline. 🤦
@davidgerard > SteamDB showed an average player count of under 10 people until late August, when it started gaining steam. By late September, this had ballooned to around 50 players, before finally hitting a peak of 431 on Oct. 1. “We are currently spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” the team wrote on its Steam update. Easy Fox also added, “This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running.”
that’s not a large number of players at all, here’s a chart of new releases on SteamDB
@davidgerard > However, the developers said that the cost of using AI will be included in the price of the game once it gets final release. “For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price,” the team said in its update. “Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.”
just forget basic mathematics and it’ll all work out I’m sure
all for a game where you… teach a deadeyed “little sister” bot how to drive via voice commands, a thing people will surely pay so much money for
@davidgerard like seriously, how does this work
which single price point makes the game go from an unexpected bank loan to sustainable?
if you assume everyone’s usage is the same (it won’t be), nobody intentionally does anything to spend tokens (they will, gamers fucking hate AI and will gladly bankrupt a studio that uses it), the game will never have more than 431 players (aka an abject failure), and nobody plays it for more than a month total (making it pretty much gimmicky shovelware, which it is), the game’s unit price is just under $70 which is fucking ridiculous for what appears to be streamer trash
games like this get popular if they’re either free or less than $10, and they don’t stay popular for long. it’s a gimmick for YouTube and tiktok, and you can’t demand much for those
not to mention all the people who’ll reverse engineer the game’s API for a cheap token source
@davidgerard and $70 is the break even point too. no profits at all, and it assumes nothing goes wrong, nothing increases in price, the game doesn’t get popular at all, nobody does anything obvious to abuse the system, nobody plays it longer than a month
this is a fucking comedy of errors
@zzt @davidgerard These people are simply insane. I assumed they are trust-fund bros who don’t need a proper job and are just LARPING for kicks, but then, why take out a loan? I just do not understand. Truly. I’m utterly baffled.
@davidgerard absolutely hilarious "win stupid prizes" consequence
@davidgerard Tom won't show me the page, so
https://archive.is/XsfwS
@farlukar @davidgerard FYI, you probably shouldn't use Archive Today's services, earlier this year they were DDOSing some random blog.
@Cal @farlukar @davidgerard Do you have an alternative bypass link?
@landelare @Cal @farlukar the answer is to stop following links
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
![[object Object]](https://media.mas.to/accounts/avatars/109/287/758/133/964/366/original/0f3099c0adfb36a0.png "[object Object]")
@davidgerard why did they use Gemini for something they could have coded?