Login
You're viewing the front-end.social public feed.
  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    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

    💬 1🔄 2⭐ 9

Replies

  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    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

    💬 4🔄 1⭐ 6
  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    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?

    💬 1🔄 1⭐ 6
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 7
  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    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

    SteamDB for this shit game: 254 players right now, 311 24-hour peak, 431 peak for 1 Oct 2026
    💬 2🔄 0⭐ 6
  • 💬 2🔄 1⭐ 10
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 7
  • JPfroztbyte@mastodon.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 12:28 PM

    @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"

    💬 2🔄 1⭐ 3
  • 💬 2🔄 0⭐ 2
  • 💬 0🔄 1⭐ 2
  • Spencerpatchyouup@mastodon.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 2:03 PM

    @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.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    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

    💬 1🔄 1⭐ 3
  • [object Object]zzt@mas.to
    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

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Roger BW 😷RogerBW@oldbytes.space
    Oct 11, 2026, 12:10 PM

    @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.

    💬 0🔄 1⭐ 2
  • magnetichumanmagnetichuman@cupoftea.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 12:22 PM

    @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.

    💬 0🔄 1⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 1⭐ 3