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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.”
Since the game’s sole control method is your voice, AI is a critical part of its programming to recognize your commands and translate them into instructions for the virtual little sister. Since the game is still a free demo, Easy Fox needs to pay for the ongoing usage costs of the game. 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.”
The developers also said that they plan on introducing local AI models for gamers with capable hardware, so they don’t have to rely on external services, which could run into limits. This is one of the issues that the game has been grappling with, especially as the increased number of users has caused it to hit usage limits on Google Gemini. 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. They might find it hard to find suitable replacement AI models, though, because Ukraine has struck Russia’s largest data center .
Increasing AI costs is one of the reasons why some companies have abandoned tokenmaxxing . Even though the price of AI has been falling quite rapidly compared to other technologies, the fact that AI agents use so many more tokens than AI chatbots has made the use of the technology more expensive than anticipated, especially as AI subscriptions have hit a pricing wall .
Token amplification and the enduring paradox of the AI economy
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- 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#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.