gosh who could have predicted that precisely this would happen
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/free-steam-demo-runs-up-usd1-000-daily-ai-bill-and-forces-devs-to-take-out-bank-loan-studio-eyes-local-hardware-models-to-escape-cloud-limits-as-cheaper-automatic-fallback-ai-models-create-problems-game-uses-ai-to-process-your-voice-and-build-responses
archive: https://archive.ph/XsfwS
Oct 11, 2026, 11:43 AM@davidgerard Tom won't show me the page, so
https://archive.is/XsfwS
@farlukar ty, added
Oct 11, 2026, 2:19 PM@farlukar @davidgerard FYI, you probably shouldn't use Archive Today's services, earlier this year they were DDOSing some random blog.
@Cal @farlukar @davidgerard Do you have an alternative bypass link?
@landelare @Cal @farlukar the answer is to stop following links
@davidgerard absolutely hilarious "win stupid prizes" consequence
@davidgerard
Play with fire, get burnt.
...the developers said that the cost of using AI will be included in the price of the game once it gets final release.
Oct 11, 2026, 11:45 AM@davidgerard > SteamDB showed an average player count of under 10 people until late August, when it started gaining steam. By late September, this had ballooned to around 50 players, before finally hitting a peak of 431 on Oct. 1. “We are currently spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” the team wrote on its Steam update. Easy Fox also added, “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.”
that’s not a large number of players at all, here’s a chart of new releases on SteamDB
Oct 11, 2026, 11:47 AM@davidgerard > However, the developers said that the cost of using AI will be included in the price of the game once it gets final release. “For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price,” the team said in its update. “Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.”
just forget basic mathematics and it’ll all work out I’m sure
all for a game where you… teach a deadeyed “little sister” bot how to drive via voice commands, a thing people will surely pay so much money for
Oct 11, 2026, 11:55 AM@zzt @davidgerard Since the selling price of every copy of this game will have to cover an average of $70 per month in AI charges, I'm going to have to order in more popcorn.
Oct 11, 2026, 12:04 PM@davidgerard like seriously, how does this work
which single price point makes the game go from an unexpected bank loan to sustainable?
if you assume everyone’s usage is the same (it won’t be), nobody intentionally does anything to spend tokens (they will, gamers fucking hate AI and will gladly bankrupt a studio that uses it), the game will never have more than 431 players (aka an abject failure), and nobody plays it for more than a month total (making it pretty much gimmicky shovelware, which it is), the game’s unit price is just under $70 which is fucking ridiculous for what appears to be streamer trash
games like this get popular if they’re either free or less than $10, and they don’t stay popular for long. it’s a gimmick for YouTube and tiktok, and you can’t demand much for those
not to mention all the people who’ll reverse engineer the game’s API for a cheap token source
Oct 11, 2026, 12:05 PM@davidgerard and $70 is the break even point too. no profits at all, and it assumes nothing goes wrong, nothing increases in price, the game doesn’t get popular at all, nobody does anything obvious to abuse the system, nobody plays it longer than a month
this is a fucking comedy of errors
Oct 11, 2026, 12:06 PM@davidgerard oh! and on top of that, it assumes the fucking final game isn’t any more complicated or longer than the demo!
why in fuck would anyone buy the game if that’s the case?
Oct 11, 2026, 12:07 PM@davidgerard this is fractally incorrect and I can’t stop digging
Oct 11, 2026, 12:14 PM@davidgerard you may not be surprised to find out that the 431 player peak lasted less than a day, that was their all-time peak and not even their average
Oct 11, 2026, 12:17 PM@zzt @davidgerard Somebody is going to lose their home to this and no lessons will be learned.
Oct 11, 2026, 12:17 PM@pndc @davidgerard all my apes gone
@pndc @zzt @davidgerard as a minor bit of novelty, *this* time no lessons will be learned because they won't be able to ask the prompt. and I think that's remarkably poignant
if we were to give this all this shit a headstone, the engraving could read "a few trillion dollars and they still couldn't ask the prompt how to fix things"
Oct 11, 2026, 12:30 PM@froztbyte @pndc @davidgerard the
Most trillions
of any Ecnomic Bubble
Oct 11, 2026, 12:34 PM@zzt @froztbyte @davidgerard The bigliest, most beautiful, crash.
@zzt @froztbyte @pndc @davidgerard And the fools running this project are there type of fools sustaining the bubble. Sure, their relative contribution is small, but there are enough like them that the AI companies can continue telling investors "look, we already have some revenue and the models will only improve!" We know it's a bubble, but many more small groups like this will bankrupt themselves in sunk cost fallacy before the pop.
@froztbyte @pndc @zzt @davidgerard
Like the fash say, learning is for nerds
Oct 11, 2026, 12:27 PM@davidgerard can any MMO engineers tell me if $70/player/month with no margin for profit and no cost limit or contract for third-party services is uhhh bad? how do I budget this
also lol @ local models being their backup plan when according to them the game barely works when it switches to a cheaper model
> This has forced the game to fall back on the less capable ChatGPT Realtime Mini 2.1 model, which has led to some player issues, like delayed responses and wrong inputs. It also said that it’s testing alternative AI models for smoother gameplay in Russia, which does not have easy access to Western models because of sanctions.
if “ChatGPT Realtime Mini 2.1” sucks, imagine how much the gamers will love it when some horrid local model that needs an entire top-end nvidia GPU to function even slower and worse than that tries to split their GPU with the fucking Unity engine
Oct 11, 2026, 12:47 PM@davidgerard god I scrolled back up and looked at “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.” again and like, motherfucker
each player isn’t particularly expensive, but the total cost has increased because of the number of players
like assuming you know nothing about the horrid economics of LLMs (which is the only way this might maybe fool you): did they expect us not to pull out a calculator and do the easy numbers? what in the fuck
pretty much the only thing that changes the cold economics of this thing for these fuckers is if they get a kagi-style sweetheart deal on a bundle of grok tokens, and I strongly suspect they’re nowhere near high-profile enough for musky boi to waste money on that
@zzt @davidgerard The devs work up a big fuss about it, simply stop paying the AI bill at launch time, and retire to Florida with the first month sales receipts.
@zzt @davidgerard A business plan devised by AI, no doubt. Whether that's because it is incentivised to sell more tokens or is just dumb is an open question.
@zzt @davidgerard it's like a microcosm of the financials of the slop industry at large
I usually don't like when bad things happens because of people stupidity, but I will make an exception for those guys.
@davidgerard LOL. A free demo that not only makes the devs *not* gain a penny — it makes them poorer while making other people richer.
And I thought *my* business skills sucked.
@davidgerard We're on the dumbest timeline. 🤦
@davidgerard AI gaming following the path trodden by Blockchain games before it, 'If we make the game and absorb colossal losses and pretend it's a success, surely people will keep on using it until it becomes profitable!' Maybe they should pull an Axie Infinity and incorporate rent seeking too, I would also say exploiting the developing world, but it's an AI project, so that's a given.
@davidgerard if 400 players incurs so much infrastructure cost that you have gone negative you do not have a game you have a burn pit for money.
@withinity @davidgerard right?! While not an MMO, I worked on an online game that had 500+ players (spread throughout some 30-ish concurrent matches) during an open beta, and it didn't come close to being our biggest expense.
@davidgerard The new game, "Teach My Little Sister How To Take Out A Bank Loan", forces it's developers to remortgage their houses to pay for said game's tokenmaxxing due to their own stupidity.
"#AI is cheap" they say, huh?
Why couldn't they make the AI an optional feature that requires an external API key that is capable of controlling the game features through an MCP implementation? That'd allow for a local LLM to be used as a fallback.
@davidgerard I feel like there’s a “challenge accepted” dare inserted in here somewhere. 🤣
@davidgerard “Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.”
😇
@davidgerard why did they use Gemini for something they could have coded?
@davidgerard
> SteamDB showed an average player count of under 10 people until late August, when it started gaining steam. By late September, this had ballooned to around 50 players, before finally hitting a peak of 431 on Oct. 1.
That's a bad, bad, no-good, terrible system to generate dialogue. 431 player count is nothing. This game will crash on release no matter what.
Whose brilliant idea was this??
@davidgerard I kinda want to download it and play it just to help them with their learning experience.
@davidgerard "It also said that it’s testing alternative AI models for smoother gameplay in Russia, which does not have easy access to Western models because of sanctions. They might find it hard to find suitable replacement AI models, though, because Ukraine has struck Russia’s largest data center."
@davidgerard This is bold: "This led its costs to skyrocket to more than a thousand dollars daily, and cheaper fallback AI models have led to slop injected into gameplay"
So what, the AI people are trying to use "slop" specifically to mean *less powerful models*? Never gonna catch on, sorry
@davidgerard lowkey wanting to see the rugpull when token prices go up. But its better if the game just crashed and died (hmmm was pun intended?)
