Ask Anthropic! I hear they worked out a solution.

They keep borrowing and giving out 'free' tokens until people are hooked.

Then gradually introduce different payment methods until they figure out what works best.

Then prices rise (I'm guessing, rather rapidly) to pay off all of the loans and to start making profits.

In the meantime, their machines are learning from the users, and learning which areas and how it can be most profitable.

Boom. They've created a profitable business that nobody wanted, nobody asked for and nobody needs. The interactors don't even realise that they're not even really using it, they're training it.

DON'T USE AI.

YOU'RE CREATING MORE PROBLEMS. MORE BEZOS' AND MORE MUSKS.

It can't. But somehow the dev hasn't noticed I guess?

If they don't let players hook up their own API key, it's a guarantee they shut it down after a year.

My guess is that they are just morons. It is really easy to be confident in your projections if you are a stupid person.

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?

Ai probably approved the idea and said it was great.

Number 3 please!

Exactly my thought. Surely you could and achieve at least a similar result.

I would say yes, yes they are dumb. Taking out a loan for a game that isn't even out yet according to the article to keep an ai going is pretty stupid. Even if the game does well, the overhead is massive for what could be done with a smaller specialized model. Hell, I bet payig someone to train an existing model would be significantly less than a $1000 a day when you aren't even making money yet.

Because this is vibe-coded. You think an LLM is going to give up how to make your own?

One of the important things to understand is that certain elements of that irrational market are very, very rational, as long as the money comes in.

It's what happens when the chumps you're grifting either smarten up or go broke that things get bumpy.

What makes you think that the demo just got massively more popular than expected? This is probably an occam's razor type of thing.

I'm more curious about how they were planning on structuring the full game to make a profit. Hopefully they're just planning on using a client side ai, but that would likely make the demo somewhat deceitful.

AI should help, not do.

For just simple and guided actions and dialogue, local would be fine for this. Or better, have AI design the large database of what to say or do when a player does things. No need to reinvent what players are going to duplicate. The token cost was worse when you consider all the same stuff being prompted over and over.

Probably only the voice is local. Natural voice requires a voice synthesis model. The “reasoning” is probably offloaded to a cloud service.

Guess you've never heard of Desert Bus.