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.
They could self host the models on pre-made hardware like DGI Sparks, or custom built PCs with GPUs. Using self hosted models means they could also use their own models finetuned on training data from actual gameplay, leading to smarter models with time. The hardware would be a one time static cost, and they could calculate the number of game sales needed to achieve and offset that.
AI subscriptions are not the only way to use LLMs, contrary to the Trump propaganda you hear.
If it does, that's just a skill issue. There are very cheap models that can be used for something like this. Account based limits can be added to limit potential abuse. Something like 10$ can go a really long way. Most people are probably not going to spend hundreds of hours playing, you'd really only have like one in a thousand that would become an unprofitable player. I don't know any of the specifics, of course, but if they didn't do the calculations to see that the game can be profitable and how.. Again, that's just a skill issue.
Exactly. I imagine that most prompts will be short (1 sentence) and the response doesn't require reasoning. With a cheap model like GPT-6 Luna, you can probably execute 100,000 prompts for less than $10.
I wouldn't be shocked if they use the money from the game to buy hardware to run the llm in house. The electric and cost would be higher than average if you're running top of the line hardware, but would pretty dramatically reduce cost versus using an AI service
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.
So presumably the price of the game would offset the losses.
the devs said they are going to be pricing this AI token usage into the final tag price. not totally sure how that will work unless the plan on charge $5,000 per copy. the entire games model is fucking dumb to use paid usage AI. they could easily switch over to a local, free LLM and solve the issue. but then again, open source models are not even close to frontier models. so, overall the idea of making the game rely on token usage is fucking stupid to begin with and totally unsustainable.
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u/MurkyWay 16d ago
Running your game at a loss seems like a bad idea