Link: https://www.ign.com/articles/ai-driving-game-demo-bank-loan

The developer behind Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, a driving instruction sim where you instruct a generative-AI-powered, dynamic NPC, has been spending $1,000 dollars a day to keep the demo working.

How can this ever be sustainable without a huge monthly subscription?

Ask Anthropic! I hear they worked out a solution.

So they didn’t even do the math for a basic cost forecast before launching the demo. Also this shit makes them vulnerable for bad actors. Just put this game on several PCs and run it 24/7 to bankrupt them.

AI powered games don’t work.

We did a super cool project for a game jam last year. Cost like 50c per game for us.

Cool for the 100 or so players who tried it, but there’s no way to make a profit from it.

Local models maybe.

Another engineer I work with had a really well put description of proper AI implementation that really applies to this:

"AI should help you build the automation, AI should not be the automation."

That sounds like the most boring game imaginable and I hope they go bankrupt from it

Guess you've never heard of Desert Bus.

I have. Sometimes boring has a weird attraction.

Does Desert Bus require tokens? If not, carry on.

For just simple and guided actions and dialogue, local would be fine for this. Or better, have AI design the large database of what to say or do when a player does things. No need to reinvent what players are going to duplicate. The token cost was worse when you consider all the same stuff being prompted over and over.

The AI disclosure on Steam claims the sister's voice is generated by a local model. If they're being charged for tokens I somehow doubt that.

If they're actually hitting a cloud LLM, there's no good reason not to wrap that and memoize the results... it would probably be hard to generalize the inputs (it could just be the whole game state for all we know 🤷‍♂️) but youd build up that database of all the most common input/outputs in real-time

Exactly, that's just smart programming (maybe that's one of the issues... but I can't say that without evidence).

I saw someone years ago develop that concept for a text to speech idea for NPC responses, and for the same reasons. Why repay for something when you can just capture the sound file for each new phrase? The cost is in the creation and addition of things, not in the actual running of every person's game (or app in this case).

Steam link

It's every bit as horrible as you're probably imagining. She has one of those talks-too-fast fake slop voices like on the YouTube spam shorts.

They keep borrowing and giving out 'free' tokens until people are hooked.

Then gradually introduce different payment methods until they figure out what works best.

Then prices rise (I'm guessing, rather rapidly) to pay off all of the loans and to start making profits.

In the meantime, their machines are learning from the users, and learning which areas and how it can be most profitable.

Boom. They've created a profitable business that nobody wanted, nobody asked for and nobody needs.
The interactors don't even realise that they're not even really using it, they're training it.

DON'T USE AI.

YOU'RE CREATING MORE PROBLEMS. MORE BEZOS' AND MORE MUSKS.

Desert Bus was part of a compilation of six games and if you played it today it would still work.

From their blog on Steam:

For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price. Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.
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.

I do not understand. They have to factor in token usage to the game price, but also the longer people play the more they will lose money over time? How is that even an operating model.

What makes you think that the demo just got massively more popular than expected? This is probably an occam's razor type of thing.

I'm more curious about how they were planning on structuring the full game to make a profit. Hopefully they're just planning on using a client side ai, but that would likely make the demo somewhat deceitful.

Why can't they just fine tune a small locally hosted model? Are they dumb?

Most gamers have a GPU anyways

That game is more art than game in the traditional sense as it was trying to make an evocative point, not a good game.

It seems that it's one of those games with zero replayability

They probably bank on streamers make fun videos in 4-5 hours of gameplay total, then the people that buy the stuff and never play it

Btw it uses Gemini and gpt, it's expensive to run that.

What if someone pirates the game and starts wasting tokens?

In case it might be interesting info, maybe want to check out WebGPU, WebLLM, Wllama, or Transformers.js. You can write web apps that run an llm on the client's browser.

It requires permission and compatibility and isn't... it might be tough to really make accessible to the average user.

But it's an option and kinda cool.

Minimum Specs : 96GB VRAM

AI should help, not do.

And a 4chan troll army could bankrupt them for funsies.

zero replayability

Missing one of the only good reasons to include AI in your game...

AI: only do, not help

If they don't let players hook up their own API key, it's a guarantee they shut it down after a year.

Probably only the voice is local. Natural voice requires a voice synthesis model. The “reasoning” is probably offloaded to a cloud service.

How long before the internet is flooded with clips of the little sister saying all kinds of nasty stuff after people prompt inject the AI?

And they say there’s a bubble, pffffffffffffffffft

It can't. But somehow the dev hasn't noticed I guess?

You joke, but I run localized AI on my cell phone. The game looks very graphically simple, so really, it shouldn't be too demanding for a smaller AI data set to respond fast enough.

Hilarious article to put out tbh. If the game wasn't broken before, it's gonna be now.

People won't play forever. Even good games are only played for maybe 100h before some other new game comes along. If you know the average game time you can calculate the ai costs.

Exactly my thought. Surely you could and achieve at least a similar result.

I would say yes, yes they are dumb. Taking out a loan for a game that isn't even out yet according to the article to keep an ai going is pretty stupid. Even if the game does well, the overhead is massive for what could be done with a smaller specialized model. Hell, I bet payig someone to train an existing model would be significantly less than a $1000 a day when you aren't even making money yet.

Good. Go bankrupt asshole.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Because this is vibe-coded. You think an LLM is going to give up how to make your own?

yes. it's not self aware.

It will though

I literally let deepseek + opencode modify the nanogpt code for my own custom model and suggest training datasets lol

Ran out of patience after a while because crappy GPU, but it was training and words were being worded when I prompted it after the first day of training

Exactly, that's just smart programming (maybe that's one of the issues... but I can't say that without evidence).

That would require you to actually understand what your code is doing...

When you're taking out loans you've noticed.

My guess is that they are just morons. It is really easy to be confident in your projections if you are a stupid person.

You could literally spend $0 and an afternoon hooking up a 4gb model to the game and having it run locally instead. Or you could also spend $0 and code a decision tree that would be fun for players to experience. Or you could choose the dumbest possible option and bankrupt yourself for no reason

me explaining to future generations why all the water dried up

Not everyone has a GPU with enough RAM. I have a 3060 with 12GB, and I cannot run ollama and a 3D game at the same time. As soon as ollama starts processing, the GPU is at 100% and game and ollama start swapping data in and out of the GPU RAM, which means the whole computer becomes unresponsive for a long time. I had to set up a script that disables ollama if steam is running.

The solution being a huge monthly subscription. Or massive token rates if you're a big customer

More like a month.