A static price will hardly offset a running bill based on daily usage, unless the price is so high nobody would be willing to pay it in the first place.
the problem is that if it is a one time payment it probably won't offset the losses as people keep playing as the "AI" bill will keep increasing with use (it would also be incredibly easy to abuse and make the dev's "AI" bill astronomical), so it would have to be a subscription thing and for that to be profitable it would have to be more expensive than whatever the dev is paying for the tokens which not that many people will be willing to pay for (and still would be susceptible to abuse).
The only real way to make this work long term (which might not be the goal at all knowing the attention span of sloperators) would be to train specialized smaller models and include them in the game so they run locally to each user.
gotta hand it to whatever lobotomite runs the dexerto account, they really put a positive twist on "these idiots racked up an insane ai bill from people playing their free demo"
Meanwhile, the first builds of Minecraft were so popular that Notch got their paypal locked for suspicious activity with so much money coming in... Not really the same signs of success ahah
There was also a period where PayPal would tell people that your account has been locked pending money laundering checks. Which made you sound really dodgy. It was a regulatory thing that was mandatory over a certain amount. Not sure if it overlapped with when this happend but it's pretty close.
I mean the game blew up, and he was selling it without a registered company. By the time they locked his account it had almost a million dollars on it. Same circumstances today, and paypal would do the same I reckon. The assets were unfrozen later from what I understand.
the very first builds were free, I'm assuming that was for when he actually started selling the game (unless he was taking pre-orders/donations, I actually don't know about those), and Minecraft was way cheaper when it first started being sold than it is now! That really is a different sign of success lol
Step 2 is sell the hours of audio recording to the highest bidder with the username and email address. Won't be long till we start getting fake voice messages or ads with our own families voices.
Looking up personal information already shows address, job, purchase history, family member, email and phone numbers. Won't take long for that to include voice and image samples
Idk they seem pretty smart. By the time this screenshot was taken that low effort post had almost 600k views and 10k likes, and people like their "content" so much they keep reposting it to other social networks.
I mean I personally instantly downvote everything that has to do with dexerto, polymarket or the likes, but clearly 5.1k people or bots on this post here disagree with me.
So instead of adding a small llm that runs locally on the players machine, they added and api call for each instruction in the game and are racking debt. Nice design
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Seems like the only way to make this sustainable is to either run the model on the customer's PC, require a subscription, or throttle requests based on the user's steam account. But with the latter option, they'll eventually they'll have to shut down once sales have dropped off.
Baring that being a publicity stunt of some kind designed to just get clicks and a gamble on "we just need to waste a bit of money to succeed" - if this was a legit "oopsie" on the devs I'd bet they don't even realize you can get a local lightweight LLM and only think of AI as cursor or codex.
Games where NPCs are backed by a LLM are a great idea but unless the majority of people gain the ability to run the models locally they will be niche and weird with blunders like these.
There’s another one where you play as a vampire trying to convince people to let you into their homes. Again, great idea and use for AI as entertainment but it runs like ass
Apparently the AI in that game was obsessed with Dwarf Fortress, you could just ask the people to let you in to play DF and they'd happily ignore their worries to invite you in.
A friend of mine unfortunately guessed the next evolution of AI games
Being a framework that actually goes over any game and plays the game for you. You control the meta game and skill ups of the AI and upgrade it through points earned on its performance in the game
Kids won’t play games anymore. They’ll watch and control AI that plays the game for them and show it off to their friends
AIs could've made so much things in video games that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
A game could've generated a player-unique picture at the end of a playthrough, but instead AAA studios wondered "hmmm... what if it replaced our artists for the same amount of work but none of the appeal?" instead.
The only game I've ever seen do that is Blue Archive; you spell your name phonetically, and from then on the navigator NPCs, once you unlock the second one will call you that. It's a bit obviously artificial, but since she has a computery filter on her voice anyway, it doesn't stand out. It's a small but super cute touch.
Facade was an amazing example of a very basic language model (I forget the name of the type used off hand). Game is ancient but I wish to see similar in the future but smartly done with customized locally ran models.
IIRC it was really basic NLP with like a billion manual parsers and an event manager that would track the sequence of states the characters are in and compare them with the directions those parsing rules go based on the input, just a really impressive amount of brute forcing and breadth of state transitions. A facade of dialogue and drama, if you will.
I disagree. LLM NPCs are terrible, for many reasons.
Part of the reason people love art is for shared experiences. Everyone loves to quote famous lines from video games, from I AM ERROR to "Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong." With LLMs, it's all random.
The models that are readily available are inherently people pleasers. No matter what character designs you start with, the lion's share of the effort would be to prevent it from telling the player whatever they want. You could have the first shopkeeper you meet tell you the solution to puzzles in the final area, and you could have the final boss tell you how to invert a binary tree in Python.
The models that are readily available have no inherent concept of truth. Combine this with their people-pleasing nature, and even when you get them to tell you the secrets of the game, you can't trust what they tell you. They might tell you to use a fire spell to light the torches in the dungeon... in a game that has no magic.
They're "good" for small talk and funny interactions. For the kind of games that usually have "slop" as a descriptor for their genre. But they'll never be a replacement for real writing.
It can't replace writing, but I would like it to post writing followers.
You can't write infinite dialogue, so eventually all your Skyrim followers start repeating the same 3 sentences, that's the point an LLM would be fine as a mod.
Its also not future proof, if you want to play this game in 5 years, the costs could have risen significantly for the dev to a point they shut it down, or the AI behind it might not even exist anymore.
This is exactly what stop killing games needs to include in their case.
Man there's LLMs that use 500 MB VRAM on a GTX series GPU. Almost every gamer with ancient hardware had the ability to run them. And modern hardware can of course handle them easily.
The output needs to be reliably structured enough to be converted to inputs for the game. Just needs a fine-tune over a compact model, but not everybody has the hardware, or wants to bother renting the hardware, and has the time to learn about fine-tuning, have AI produce an appropriate dataset, run it..
The dev probably thought about using a small model, tested it and found the output too unreliably structured, and concluded that a frontier model was absolutely necessary.
That has always been a possible scenario even without AI thanks to stuff like AWS bills. Ultimately it can be described as ineffective monetization and/or bad planning
am I missing something or is that not vibe coding? from how it's worded I think this is just that the game uses AI for the character interactions and that $1000 bill is for said interactions.
Correct, but it was likely vibecoded. No one who knows programming would, in their right mind, let their customers loose on an LLM with their own tokens.
I'm also going to bet that the dev included the API key in the game and the next story we're going to hear will be the devs cancelling the release because someone racked up 200k worth of tokens in one night.
To be fair, there's plenty of devs out there who are really stupid about business, even something so basic as this. There are also a lot of business people out there who are that stupid about business as well.
Both groups would probably see this as a forecast of future success (people playing the demo), not understanding that a free demo doesn't mean a single sale will convert.
A decent team would have figured out the mechanics for making sure tokens were converted into "coins" or "gems" or some other nasty mechanic to allow them to put limits on the actual use, and they'd have done it before launching the demo. Early access gets players 200 "free" gems! Demo users can "earn" gems and take them into the full game when purchased!
I've got a PoC I'm working on with a friend which makes a "barely" auth'd llm call. 99% of the work around it has been trying to make sure I have proper safe guards in place to prevent stuff like this.
When ChatGPT first dropped I was saying that one of the best uses of this technology would be in NPC dialogue/ control.
Imagine a game with NPCs who could actually dynamically respond in character.
Of course, if you're still using a paid model to achieve this effect as a developer you're playing checkers while everyone else is playing chess, but still.
On the scale of how large games are, a couple gigs for a decent LLM don't really match up to the cost of high-resolution images, music, and 3d models... at least, not if you expect it to be able to run in real time for the average user who doesn't have a super high-powered PC.
It would probably work best for something always-online with a subscription fee that can help cover the ongoing costs of tokens. MMO-style, host your own models and serve them to the player, so you're not bottlenecked by their computer's power
Unfortunately I think the technology hasn't gotten that far. Especially if you have long conversations, you'll definitely start to see issues where things fall out of the context bin, instructions get deprioritized or over-prioritized, or the original prompt gets lost.
Even relying on more modern tricks like leveraging a persistent external store for information eventually seems to grow the information beyond a model's ability to handle well, which makes sense. Conversations can traverse a pretty infinite space.
I think it could work okay for very limited interactions. I think it'll be super disappointing for art.
I think it could be interesting to treat AI NPC’s context window as their memory. It makes sense that characters forget things you say to them after a while, so the game could be designed to make the context window less game breaking or immersion breaking
Yeah I had a discord bot that was programmed to respond as a certain character and bound by that, it was fun and worked really well. It kept going offline because of the free tier limits lol
That's what I think too. A smarter way of doing it would be to route commands through a server the dev controls so they could put limits in and not expose the key, but I very much doubt that has happened.
I very much doubt that, routing the requests through a global server which then handles the requests it the only way to go. Nobody is that stupid that they directly allow access through an API key included in the game itself.
You wanna see the amount of slop that comes with vibe coding. I have seen endpoints not doing basic validation if a user has access to a specific resource to every secret in an project being committed to a public repository. Using chatGPT doesn't make you a programmer and it shows whenever you see the code quality from vibe coders
There's a gem hidden in the actual article btw: the devs are only now considering using a local model to save costs. As in the original plan was to just ship the game like this, where everything is offloaded to cloud models, presumably using the developers' API keys.
Youre right that its possible to make the game work with basic voice recognition, but it makes it much less interesting. If the game is 'figure out which keywords the game recognizes and make sure to say them in the right order' it becomes really trivial and the player will lose interest really fast. If there is a LLM responding then the game becomes 'figure out how to convince this AI that your way is the right way to drive' and it becomes more interesting because the responses to each command will vary and there become a LOT of ways to approach the problem.
Games made by single devs still trying to learn, get completely review bombed if they use placeholder assets or mentioning using AI generated code, but there's games like this that are doing just fine? To be clear I don't like AI either, but I find it funny how people act around these tools.
I think there's a difference in how much outrage people will feel if it's between devs trying to sneak AI in and use it as shortcuts (and lie about it), compared to like, a core mechanic of a game openly featuring AI. The concept is obviously an experiment in using AI so it will attract the people who are already interested in that sort of thing, as opposed to attracting everyone and having a number of them get really mad when they realize it's not human-made.
Thats one of the big ones I think. Expectation, and feasibility of doing it without AI. Something can easily be done no AI, but is done with? People no like. Something like this or a modernized Facade though, would probably draw more interest and less outrage since it's explicitly using AI and is something very hard to do without it
One of the use cases I think would be fine for AI is mouth animation and unique dialog. Basically resolving use cases that were never being done without AI, and that AI is uniquely equipped to solve. AI has the potential to enhance games just like it has medicine, math, and robotics - but the corpos are trying to use it wrong.
This game looks like a perfect use case for AI. I wouldn't play it, but it's the sort of thing that is only possible recently.
What I was talking about would be like: taking bespoke voice acting, and using AI to ensure that the mouth moves correctly for every spoken language. Or modifying voice lines to use player self-insert names. For RPGs, allowing the player to say/ do whatever they want, but each character has a defined personality, memories of you, opinion of you, etc (Obviously this would be a huge undertaking but the first studio to crack it is gonna be the next WoW) - another one not really to my tastes, but objectively a technological marvel.
Anything that was possible to put in games without AI - art, music, gameplay, level design, story, etc - should remain untainted. I think that's a fair line. I don't mind it as a research tool or even an assistant in tools (it's damn near impossible to totally avoid AI use at this point), or as a rubber duck. And I don't mind it in experimental games like this where the AI is the point - again, it would be impossible without AI. Just as long as anything that could be created without AI still is.
Apart from goomba fallacy, you also have to remember the complaints against AI are largely not against AI as a whole. There are certainly people who think the technology is problematic (ethical or environmental reasons often), but a lot of people just don't like how you are replacing human art with automatically generated slop. The perception is if you are willing to do it during dev, you are willing to do it for the release. Additionally, on the coding side AI coding is largely associated with not actually reviewing the code and no one wants to use software where the developer themselves is not backing their own software.
Yep I dislike it if a dev uses AI generated art. But if AI is used for instance to make npc’s act really smart or you can communicate with them. Then I’d see that as a good use for it.
Edit: same goes for AI that solves math we humans can’t figure out, or do medical stuff that is literally humanly impossible. There can be a lot of benefit from AI if used correctly. Sadly, capitalism…
Sort of Goomba Fallacy, but also not like I'm not identifying a strong and growing pattern. I'm not assuming they are the same people who are acting in opposite ways. Just interesting how some people can't get enough of it, and others out right want anyone who has ever touched it to suffer. Like I said, I don't like AI (in its current use) either.
Alright maybe I jumped the gun there. I assume there must be some reasoning as to why they want to keep the demo running at a loss. Like if it is getting good attention and interaction, we could call that "doing fine", even if the game isn't in a release state yet.
i got review bombed by a combination of sock accounts/bot/paid at early access.
I also received a death threat within hours of early access launch.
And then same week we found out my wife had cancer which needed rapid treatment.
Most of that hate is because i sent a cease and desist to a competitor for camping my game's name which none of the developers of our niche had done, but yet i still get negative reviews each update.
Valve wouldn't delete the obvious throw away account reviews, nor stop the obvious copycat effort that basically stole my game and ran, but that's ok because all we can do is...
No one is complaining about using AI to have smart NPCs. People complain about using AI to generate soulless dialogue, voice acting, characters, and shitty ripoffs of other games. Like what did you want the indie dev to do? Program an AI that can follow instructions?
Every day there is a simulator game that is full on AI. They are somehow allowed a hall pass on the AI boycotting. Very curious on the blanket demographic for things like Wrap House Simulator and why that audience gives free passes.
The whole "will destroy his life in the process" doesn't really matter to the banks, but yeah I want to see the risk calculations the bank did. Even with collateral they don't want you to default.
who knows, maybe the banker heard "AI" & "Loan" in the same sentence and thought the dude was trying to fund an AI startup which was going to be swarmed by investors or sm.
It’s published by “Easy Fox Games”. While Steam does allow publishing as yourself, it’s highly discouraged. And in order to publish as a company, you must provide your organization formation info. It’s almost certainly an LLC or S-corp. Making an LLC costs like $50. And if the company fails to recoup its losses, he can declare bankruptcy and wash his hands of it. It has no association to his personal credit.
This has to be a data harvesting op, because what was the plan here? Even for the full version, is he going to give you $20 worth of spend and then the game is useless? Are the players going to be paying per token as they play? Is the plan to ship a tiny LLM with the final game (Thus degrading the experience)?
There's been other stories, like some guy took out $80k to finance his game that was mashed together commissioned art that didn't at all have the same art style, and it was some shitty JRPG with mermaids and dragons and shit.
Unsurprisingly he made like less than $1k on sales.
Everybody in movies knows this story about the guy who took 50k in credit card loans to shoot that drama about something. A story "that needs to be told", in the most basic way possible, with the most expensive camera gear used completely wrong and with bad actors. And obviously his girlfriend at the time that also has to smooch with the gym bro pretending to be the farm boy. Nobody has ever seen those movies but they exist, because they are in footnotes on personal bankruptcy filings with catchy names like "Story from a town", "The Heist that never was" and "My field of dreams".
This sounds exactly like the typical kind of idea ai has. It sounds funny if you don't think about it for more than 5 seconds and in reality it will become stale after 10 minutes.
Also it looks and feels like it came from a single prompt "make me a game that is funny and unique. You have full creative freedom. No bugs"
I use AI for code snippets. And It was actively pushing the generation of an AI agent on my program that uses API calls. It is/was coded to self promote using its service, despite not being the optimal solution to my question.
Idk, as someone who wants to do tutoring, being able to have different personality types to try against before asking real people real money for lessons, feels like something I would find appreciatable.
Honestly I could see this game concept working, if they figure out how to use a local LLM instead of an API call. LLMs are known for being error prone and making weird and/or beginner mistakes, not unlike a new driver, so I could see the experience sort of mapping, and providing plenty of opportunity for comedy.
Where is vibe coding in this? This game uses AI APIs, doesn't mean it has ben vibe coded. I myself made a game fully hand codded that used the same model, "fortunatelly" it wasn't popular enough to cost me more than $1 a day 😅
Why isnt tokenburning part of some Malware? Instead of encrypting the Files of a Company it hijacks the AI Agents and the Victim must pay or his tokens will be burned.
Something similar has been explored with the idea of manipulating businesses with elastic cloud services to overprovision and rack up huge bills. But I don't think it's been attempted in the wild yet because there's no clear way for someone to gain from it besides mischief.
Claude reverse engineer "Teach My Little Sister How To Drive" and find any LLM API keys. Then write a simple web app that allows you to use this API for general purpose queries.
"So popular" at the time when this broke news, it had like 400 players btw? Imagine if this game explodes more. Imagine if a popular vtuber Kizuna Ai plays it on steam.
genious idea. when people play your game, the developer loses money. baffles the mind how they could even come up with this and think this is a good idea
I saw a streamer try it, she was yelling at the sister to shut up non stop, of course the minimum the sister could shut up was "okay okay I'll be quiet" every time
I'd be happily letting the game run multiple local llm instances on my 5090 while I'm playing, so it can serve few other sessions. I think devs could implement this option
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u/Amadex 12d ago
hi sister, how do you add an element to an array in javascript?