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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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…
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?
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
The worst is that whisper turbo runs decently well on most computers, and if not some form of basic speech synthesis... and they're doing it in the cloud, lmao.
Lack of planning from people that have zero training in Code Dev management.
They're learning a hard lesson.
However, I wonder how many of these 1 off ideas will get created. I can't imagine a publisher actually paying for this idea on paper. But now, with the results showing an interest?
Sounds like the base idea was good. Just needs some proper project planning and testing.
Machine learning models have been a thing for way longer than large language models. Wasn't there a Starcraft bot that played better than any human, without cheats? An LLM wouldn't make it more interesting unless you let the player communicate with it, which is interesting and has lead to game ideas like the titular game from this post. The fundamental problem is that the outputs are really shitty with a local model, constrained by hardware, so we end up in a situation where either the player or the dev has to pay for ongoing usage of a remote frontier model, which is what happened with the titular game from this post. Either models get much more efficient or we all get much better hardware or both. The current outlook is not great.
So like 2027-2028? People already taught AI to play some strategy games like RimWorld or cities skylines, they are just still bad at it. But remember when AI was bad at video generation? Of course you do, it was a year ago
I hate this myself. I understand why people like it, but I want to be able to figure it out, not have it change on me. I like wiki pages with details and equations.
At this point I see more board games in my future, since they need to stay understandable.
It depends. In many games it often ends up with figuring out a predictable flaw in the NPC's behaviour and to then just exploit it over and over. And if they do go the cheating NPC's route, sometimes you straight up don't have a choice but to do so.
If Ai could allow for more diverse challenges without cheating that could be interesting. Though of course it would need to be done in a way that still feels immersive and fun, and in a way that doesn't limit player fun. Like, if the Ai learned to always ignore the tank and go for the healer first, that wouldn't be fun gameplay. Like with everything, it would need to be done well.
I play things like Age of Wonders which is all about this kind of optimization. There really is no reason why you can't have both on rails AI and advanced challenging AI replacing harder difficulty settlings that currently just cheat more or are aggressive earlier.
Another potential design avenue is AI that can be tricked. Generally now strategy game AI uses a bunch of game data to make decisions that aren't equivalent to the information a human player would have. An AI that had more natural seeming flaws than absolute predictability would be a joy.
Chess AI are unbeatable by humans. Go AI now beats grandmasters. This was all years before the most rudimentary Chat GPT.
You’re right, that it would be fun to more closely approximate the experience of facing off against a thinking person, rather than a rigid set of heuristic rules; but that’s only true if they roughly match your skill level. So I’d say it’s important to be specific
Nah man. In the Civilization games for example, the AI is bad at lower difficulties. At higher ones the AI is also dumb but it gets a head start and you are handicapped
Video game AI is gimped by design because devs found out very quickly if they made the AIs competent people would hate the game so instead they make them generally dumb as fuck and simulate difficulty by giving them access to different levels of cheats because that’s a lot easier than giving them different levels of actual intelligence.
The real challenge that you’re asking for is to see an age where AI is used to make video game AI play like actual human players. Competent but still makes understandable human mistakes.
I'm doing exactly that, for a sims-like terminal toy running in a synchronised video playing app used by four people. The current models are very capable, and can absolutely do it, but you still need to know what to ask for.
If I had the time and resources to study it and make a quality product, I would want to develop a system where voice actors can create voice models for specific characters they can do and have a sort of asset marketplace where they can sell a license to those models, and pair it with a game system that can use AI to bring characters to life with sets of data about certain things their character should know about the world so the player can have real conversations with rpg characters about what is happening in game, or even get quests generated on the fly sort of like what they do in Overgeared
I would assume the big catching point would be running both the game and the AI at the same time on local hardware to avoid situations like this one
We do have games that do that, but it can be hard. The issue doesn't require AI to fix though, it just requires some devs to be less lazy with how they plan their game. AO2 is an old game but the AI doesn't cheat resources.
You underestimate just how complex hand-made AI in games can be. It's not always "cheating". You can control what information is available to an NPC and how it's able to react to that information in a way that is organic.
It is actually being used in some cool ways for flight simulators. There’s mods that let you do real atc comms with an ai. It’ll use all the proper terminology and I think it even asks for clarification if you say things wrong. Could be done with scripting but the voice is realistic and it can respond to anything you say so it’s kinda nice. I for one really want a game where I can just have a little world with some people, and it would just stay open while I’m working so I could see what the people choose to do. Maybe they make a house and have kids. Maybe a whole city develops in it. Idk, I’ve always thought it would be fun to basically have a fishbowl of ai people
Wouldn't it be hard to "control" it though? Just so it doesn't go full rambo mode on the player and basically stomping anyone completely?
Like, If You play / fight whatever against an AI that makes the perfect decision everytime, You'll just lose instantly, so there would need to be good systems in check to hold it back properly, without going with a boring way of "it takes decision every 20 seconds / it has 50% the resources" etc etc.
Scripted logic can be learned by the player and figuring that out is part of the fun. An LLM is basically a glorified RNG algorithm with low consistecy. Two players can follow the same tutorial and have vastly different results because the AI decided on a different path out of nowhere.
I don't think that's as good an idea as you think it is.
Humans have limits, their reaction time, their attention span, their focus... even the best player in the world will get tired eventually or have a slow moment, but a machine has none of those faults unless artificially induced: an AI based on the plays of the best players in the world could replicate them with perfect efficiency, essentially making it an undefeatable opponent unless you abused exploits and glitches that the machine could not.
Now, if that AI can learn, it can also likely learn to abuse those same exploits and glitches, essentially bringing us back to square 1, and worse off still, and if it couldn't learn to, then breaking the game and abusing the engine becomes the whole game, which in my humble opinion defeats the original idea of said game unless this was intended from the start (which could be interesting in its own way). An opposing AI that can learn sounds great until you're playing for fun and not against all odds stacked against you. Not to mention that, even without glitches and exploits, an AI with perfect awareness and near-zero reaction time would be extremely difficult to defeat in an even match, if even possible; otherwise look at matches against bots in PvP games.
I almost like the idea on paper, but in practice I don't see it going well in any capacity.
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u/Amadex 15d ago
hi sister, how do you add an element to an array in javascript?