AI Driving Game Players Are Burning Through So Many Tokens Its Developer Had to Take Out a Bank Loan to Keep It Running
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.
https://www.ign.com/articles/ai-driving-game-demo-bank-loanOpen linkView original on piefed.ca
85 replies
How can this ever be sustainable without a huge monthly subscription?
Ask Anthropic! I hear they worked out a solution.
The solution being a huge monthly subscription. Or massive token rates if you're a big customer
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.
It can't. But somehow the dev hasn't noticed I guess?
When you're taking out loans you've noticed.
I wonder if their goal is to have big demo player numbers and then exit the company off to a clueless investor
Easy, you just hyperinflate the USD!
Infinite money glitch, irl.
From their blog on Steam:
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.
If they don't let players hook up their own API key, it's a guarantee they shut it down after a year.
More like a month.
It’s an avenue for abuse. Buy the game: unlimited “free” tokens. Like happened with Chipotle’s AI.
My guess is that they are just morons. It is really easy to be confident in your projections if you are a stupid person.
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?
Missing one of the only good reasons to include AI in your game...
And a 4chan troll army could bankrupt them for funsies.
Ai probably approved the idea and said it was great.
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.
You're still opening up for credentials to be harvested and troll requested by script kiddos
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.
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
If the game uses the Steam SDK, they "of course" can at least check that the request comes from an authorized game (SSO via Steam). But sure, people who bought the game can still easily troll the dev, unless they also employ some kind of anti-cheat system. But from what it sounds like even then a troll could simply play the game excessively and then ramp up costs for the dev.
Loans are normal and you take losses to capture the market then you enshittify
But loans don’t scale with the amount of players and played hours. They typically purely factor into the cost of development and support.
Server costs.
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.
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
Number 3 please!
Why are there so many opportunities to post this meme?
lol not reading that
Boooy is this "meme" exposing your well deserved insecurities.
No you dont.
There will only be more as time passes.
The only model I program with is a Model M.
Well maybe its a Mini M, but close enough XP
Why can't they just fine tune a small locally hosted model? Are they dumb?
Most gamers have a GPU anyways
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 dislike AI slop as much as the next guy but that's a stupid take
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
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.
12GB is a lot of ram. By small local models I am talking about fine tuning something like < 2GB LLM
Sorry, all of your what?
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
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.
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.
me explaining to future generations why all the water dried up
And why computers became rentals again
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
AI running a video game, somehow still less power efficient than a playstation 1. Good job guys. Just make an actual video game.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Actually sounds like the perfect use case for a model like Jev. I think Jevos should be able to handle that locally.
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.
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.
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
It looks like a very simple game graphically, so having say 2GB VRAM left over for a small model would probably be viable?
I can’t say for certain but based on how the game is described, I don’t think it’s likely a 2GB model would be viable at all.
Probably not a viable game in that case, unless the dev makes people link their own API keys.
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.
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.
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.
Hilarious article to put out tbh. If the game wasn't broken before, it's gonna be now.
And they say there’s a bubble, pffffffffffffffffft
Good. Go bankrupt asshole.