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.
me explaining to future generations why all the water dried up
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
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
Why can’t they just fine tune a small locally hosted model? Are they dumb?
Most gamers have a GPU anyways
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.
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.
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.
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
It will though
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.
My guess is that they are just morons. It is really easy to be confident in your projections if you are a stupid person.
If they don’t let players hook up their own API key, it’s a guarantee they shut it down after a year.
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?
zero replayability
Missing one of the only good reasons to include AI in your game…
And a 4chan troll army could bankrupt them for funsies.
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.
How can this ever be sustainable without a huge monthly subscription?
It can’t. But somehow the dev hasn’t noticed I guess?
When you’re taking out loans you’ve noticed.
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.
Ask Anthropic! I hear they worked out a solution.
Hilarious article to put out tbh. If the game wasn’t broken before, it’s gonna be now.
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.
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.
Minimum Specs : 96GB VRAM
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.
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?
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.”
AI should help, not do.
AI: only do, not help
And they say there’s a bubble, pffffffffffffffffft
Good. Go bankrupt asshole.
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.
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.
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).
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…
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.
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.
Probably only the voice is local. Natural voice requires a voice synthesis model. The “reasoning” is probably offloaded to a cloud service.
That sounds like the most boring game imaginable and I hope they go bankrupt from it
Guess you’ve never heard of Desert Bus.
Does Desert Bus require tokens? If not, carry on.
Desert Bus was part of a compilation of six games and if you played it today it would still work.
I have. Sometimes boring has a weird attraction.
That game is more art than game in the traditional sense as it was trying to make an evocative point, not a good game.
