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AI Driving Game Players Are Burning Through So Many Tokens Its Developer Had to Take Out a Bank Loan to Keep It Running (www.ign.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 138 points 4 weeks ago (12 children)

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.

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  • [–] 66 points 4 weeks ago* (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 38 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    Loans are normal and you take losses to capture the market then you enshittify

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  • [–] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    But loans don’t scale with the amount of players and played hours. They typically purely factor into the cost of development and support.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Server costs.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    Typically scales fractional to the user count and often in steps. These costs stay relatively stable no matter if you have 1 or 10000 players (for example), then rise a bit to support 18000 players, etc. And they should not start out high enough to require a loan just for them.

    If you build an MMO and get a sudden influx of millions on players… ok. Then maybe. But they typically also grow somewhat organically.

    Each user causing you direct costs that even increase with their usage is… not optimal. But hey, it’s worth a shot, I guess.

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