AI Driving Game Players Are Burning Through So Many Tokens Its Developer Had to Take Out a Bank Loan to Keep It Running

3 days ago by iamthetot to c/games

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.

Rhynoplaz 155 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26249595, hotness: undefined, score: 155, children: 7
Katana314 74 points 3 days ago

Ask Anthropic! I hear they worked out a solution.

path: 0 26249595 26249670, hotness: undefined, score: 74, children: 1
VibeSurgeon 5 points 2 days ago

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

path: 0 26249595 26249670 26259094, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
Babalugats 53 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26249595 26250736, hotness: undefined, score: 53, children: 0
Creat 15 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26249595 26253292, hotness: undefined, score: 15, children: 2
Rhynoplaz 7 points 2 days ago

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

path: 0 26249595 26253292 26256258, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 1
BlaestEgnen 4 points 2 days ago

I wonder if their goal is to have big demo player numbers and then exit the company off to a clueless investor

path: 0 26249595 26253292 26256258 26259684, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
sp3ctr4l 3 points 2 days ago

Easy, you just hyperinflate the USD!

Infinite money glitch, irl.

path: 0 26249595 26265297, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
FridaVanMercury 140 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26250791, hotness: undefined, score: 140, children: 17
Grimy 65 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26250791 26252105, hotness: undefined, score: 65, children: 2
PHLAK 21 points 2 days ago

More like a month.

path: 0 26250791 26252105 26259397, hotness: undefined, score: 21, children: 0
Cornballer 9 points 2 days ago

It’s an avenue for abuse. Buy the game: unlimited “free” tokens. Like happened with Chipotle’s AI.

path: 0 26250791 26252105 26268013, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
Wispy2891 38 points 3 days ago

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?

path: 0 26250791 26251770, hotness: undefined, score: 38, children: 2
Bane_Killgrind 34 points 3 days ago

zero replayability

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

path: 0 26250791 26251770 26252073, hotness: undefined, score: 34, children: 0
SkunkWorkz 17 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26250791 26251770 26252039, hotness: undefined, score: 17, children: 0
a_non_monotonic_function 37 points 2 days ago

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

path: 0 26250791 26256363, hotness: undefined, score: 37, children: 0
rethnor 12 points 2 days ago

Ai probably approved the idea and said it was great.

path: 0 26250791 26265927, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 0
GenosseFlosse 5 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26250791 26253624, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 4
BlaestEgnen 5 points 2 days ago

You're still opening up for credentials to be harvested and troll requested by script kiddos

path: 0 26250791 26253624 26259702, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 3
aksdb 4 points a day ago

Only if the client is making the requests directly. If your own infrastructure is in between (which it should), you can limit the kind of requests and their rate at will.

Of course that’s an architecture I am not sure someone who develops something like this has on their mind.

path: 0 26250791 26253624 26259702 26275877, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 2
BlaestEgnen 1 point a day ago

Of course you can rate limit individual IPS/devices.

But that's gonna turn your most avid players against you, as their game will stop working. The API requests can mimic in game behaviour, it just requires one person willing to make a decent script set up and distribute the script on a troll forum.

There might be an api key trick with steam I'm not aware of, but if they're not careful anyone can just generate an api key

path: 0 26250791 26253624 26259702 26275877 26276821, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
ILikeBoobies 2 points 2 days ago

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

path: 0 26250791 26266336, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 3
aksdb 5 points a day ago

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

path: 0 26250791 26266336 26275858, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 2
ILikeBoobies 1 point 20 hours ago

Server costs.

path: 0 26250791 26266336 26275858 26281272, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
aksdb 2 points 18 hours 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.

path: 0 26250791 26266336 26275858 26281272 26283357, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
Funkt4st1c 116 points 2 days ago

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

path: 0 26256599, hotness: undefined, score: 116, children: 9
Aneb 5 points 2 days ago

Number 3 please!

path: 0 26256599 26268040, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
jaykrown 1 point 2 days ago
path: 0 26256599 26267785, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
p03locke -12 points 2 days ago

Why are there so many opportunities to post this meme?

We are not the same!

path: 0 26256599 26263748, hotness: undefined, score: -12, children: 6
DummyWOW 15 points 2 days ago

lol not reading that

path: 0 26256599 26263748 26264095, hotness: undefined, score: 15, children: 1
keithnator3000 17 points 2 days ago

path: 0 26256599 26263748 26264095 26269409, hotness: undefined, score: 17, children: 0
Funkt4st1c 3 points 2 days ago

No you dont.

path: 0 26256599 26263748 26267404, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
ddplf 3 points 2 days ago

Boooy is this "meme" exposing your well deserved insecurities.

path: 0 26256599 26263748 26269699, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
keithnator3000 2 points 2 days ago

There will only be more as time passes.

path: 0 26256599 26263748 26269416, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
magic_smoke 1 point 2 days ago

The only model I program with is a Model M.

Well maybe its a Mini M, but close enough XP

path: 0 26256599 26263748 26268193, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
iceberg314 80 points 3 days ago

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

Most gamers have a GPU anyways

path: 0 26251561, hotness: undefined, score: 80, children: 10
Bluefruit 27 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26251561 26253840, hotness: undefined, score: 27, children: 0
DrPop 6 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26251561 26255369, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 4
FunnyUsername 25 points 3 days ago

yes. it's not self aware.

path: 0 26251561 26255369 26255475, hotness: undefined, score: 25, children: 0
CybranM 6 points 2 days ago

I dislike AI slop as much as the next guy but that's a stupid take

path: 0 26251561 26255369 26264323, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
boonhet 4 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26251561 26255369 26255712, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
chicken 4 points 3 days ago

It will though

path: 0 26251561 26255369 26255494, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
GenosseFlosse 4 points 2 days ago

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.

path: 0 26251561 26258824, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 3
iceberg314 4 points 2 days ago

12GB is a lot of ram. By small local models I am talking about fine tuning something like < 2GB LLM

path: 0 26251561 26258824 26268788, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
esc 3 points 2 days ago
  1. ollama is bad at everything they do. 2. They can run a really small llm, as the requierements are pretty limited.
path: 0 26251561 26258824 26261552, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
OrteilGenou 1 point 2 days ago

Sorry, all of your what?

path: 0 26251561 26258824 26269145, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
Wakko 70 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26254374, hotness: undefined, score: 70, children: 1
CrimeIsLegalNow 5 points 2 days ago

One of the important things to understand is that certain elements of that irrational market are very, very rational, as long as the money comes in.

It's what happens when the chumps you're grifting either smarten up or go broke that things get bumpy.

path: 0 26254374 26259572, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
SkunkWorkz 60 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26249700, hotness: undefined, score: 60, children: 3
ColeSloth 10 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26249700 26251111, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 2
Valmond 8 points 3 days ago

Minimum Specs : 96GB VRAM

path: 0 26249700 26251111 26251787, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 1
ColeSloth -1 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26249700 26251111 26251787 26253407, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 0
toxicbubble 53 points 2 days ago

me explaining to future generations why all the water dried up

path: 0 26257130, hotness: undefined, score: 53, children: 1
goferking0 0 points a day ago

And why computers became rentals again

path: 0 26257130 26272892, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 0
Mordikan 43 points 3 days ago

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."

path: 0 26249973, hotness: undefined, score: 43, children: 2
Valmond 9 points 3 days ago

AI should help, not do.

path: 0 26249973 26251798, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 1
SkunkWorkz 8 points 3 days ago

AI: only do, not help

path: 0 26249973 26251798 26252069, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0
lepinkainen 19 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26249755, hotness: undefined, score: 19, children: 5
Rhaedas 8 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26249755 26250362, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 3
Ledivin 6 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26249755 26250362 26250503, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 2
Rhaedas 4 points 3 days ago

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).

path: 0 26249755 26250362 26250503 26250584, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 1
TrippaSnippa 3 points 2 days ago

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...

path: 0 26249755 26250362 26250503 26250584 26256203, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
HeHoXa 1 point 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26249755 26251775, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
grahamja 19 points 2 days ago

AI running a video game, somehow still less power efficient than a playstation 1. Good job guys. Just make an actual video game.

path: 0 26269285, hotness: undefined, score: 19, children: 0
Cricket 18 points 3 days ago

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?

path: 0 26252492, hotness: undefined, score: 18, children: 0
MangoPenguin 16 points 2 days ago

Given that people playing this have GPUs, why not run the AI model locally? I can't imagine it needs to be a very large model.

path: 0 26269183, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 4
aksdb 3 points a day ago

Actually sounds like the perfect use case for a model like Jev. I think Jevos should be able to handle that locally.

path: 0 26269183 26275751, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
EncryptKeeper 3 points 20 hours ago

Because even very small models will take up a large chunk of your cards VRAM, if not all of it. And then you still have to render the game on top of it.

path: 0 26269183 26281495, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2
humanspiral 1 point 20 hours ago

There are 1-2gb vram models that should fit in anything. Game doesn't appear to be texture heavy, and targetting a 6gb gpu, would cover anything less than 10-12 years old.

path: 0 26269183 26281495 26281787, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
EncryptKeeper 2 points 18 hours ago

A 1-2 min vram model would probably not be sufficient for what the game is trying to do. Those micro models aren’t really for anything beyond basic object image recognition or RAG searching

path: 0 26269183 26281495 26281787 26283180, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
Davel23 15 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26250437, hotness: undefined, score: 15, children: 1
SkunkWorkz 12 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26250437 26252128, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 0
bitjunkie 13 points 3 days ago

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.

path: 0 26250627, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 0
frustrated_phagocytosis 11 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26250102, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 5
Kolanaki 8 points 3 days ago

Guess you've never heard of Desert Bus.

path: 0 26250102 26250145, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 4
frustrated_phagocytosis 12 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26250102 26250145 26250345, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 0
Widdershins 9 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26250102 26250145 26250743, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
Rhaedas 8 points 3 days ago

I have. Sometimes boring has a weird attraction.

path: 0 26250102 26250145 26250315, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 1
techt 4 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26250102 26250145 26250315 26251676, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
chunes 11 points 3 days ago

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

path: 0 26253414, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 0
trashboat 9 points 3 days ago

And they say there’s a bubble, pffffffffffffffffft

path: 0 26253029, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
Pratai 5 points 3 days ago

Good. Go bankrupt asshole.

path: 0 26254266, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
Tollana1234567 2 points 2 days ago
path: 0 26259924, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
games
games

@lemmy.world

login for more options
51185
10053
6996

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Rules

1. Submissions have to be related to games

Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.

This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.

2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.

We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.

3. No excessive self-promotion

Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.

This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.

4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.

We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.

5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.

No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.

6. No linking to piracy

Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

Authorized Regular Threads

Related communities

PM a mod to add your own

Video games

Generic

Help and suggestions

By platform
By type
By games
Language specific

go to feed...