My guess is that they are just morons. It is really easy to be confident in your projections if you are a stupid person.
FridaVanMercury@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
From their blog on Steam:
For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price. Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game. 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.
I do not understand. They have to factor in token usage to the game price, but also the longer people play the more they will lose money over time? How is that even an operating model.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It seems that it’s one of those games with zero replayability
They probably bank on streamers make fun videos in 4-5 hours of gameplay total, then the people that buy the stuff and never play it
Btw it uses Gemini and gpt, it’s expensive to run that.
What if someone pirates the game and starts wasting tokens?
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
zero replayability
Missing one of the only good reasons to include AI in your game…
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And a 4chan troll army could bankrupt them for funsies.
rethnor@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Ai probably approved the idea and said it was great.
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
People won’t play forever. Even good games are only played for maybe 100h before some other new game comes along. If you know the average game time you can calculate the ai costs.
BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
You’re still opening up for credentials to be harvested and troll requested by script kiddos
aksdb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Only if the client is making the requests directly. If your own infrastructure is in between (which it should), you can limit the kind of requests and their rate at will.
Of course that’s an architecture I am not sure someone who develops something like this has on their mind.
BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Of course you can rate limit individual IPS/devices.
But that’s gonna turn your most avid players against you, as their game will stop working. The API requests can mimic in game behaviour, it just requires one person willing to make a decent script set up and distribute the script on a troll forum.
There might be an api key trick with steam I’m not aware of, but if they’re not careful anyone can just generate an api key
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Loans are normal and you take losses to capture the market then you enshittify
aksdb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But loans don’t scale with the amount of players and played hours. They purely factor into the cost of development and support.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Server costs.
aksdb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Typically scales fractional to the user count and often in steps. These costs stay relatively stable no matter if you have 1 or 10000 players (for example), then rise a bit to support 18000 players, etc. And they should not start out high enough to require a loan just for them.
If you build an MMO and get a sudden influx of millions on players… ok. Then maybe. But they typically also grow somewhat organically.
Each user causing you direct costs that even increase with their usage is… not optimal. But hey, it’s worth a shot, I guess.
Grimy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If they don’t let players hook up their own API key, it’s a guarantee they shit it down after a year.
PHLAK@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
More like a month.
Cornballer@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It’s an avenue for abuse. Buy the game: unlimited “free” tokens. Like happened with Chipotle’s AI.