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.
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.
Depends on how Complicated the Developers Made it. If the model is being primarily used to convert voice instructions into some json format that is then being used by the game in order to do it's own logic it could be much less than how models typically do their "reasoning" which tend to involve models breaking down the given information and the outputs into smaller steps by utilizing additional layers in order to simulate chains of thought which is a lot more costly.
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.
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
This assumes people will play the game forever. The reality is the vast majority of people would drop it after a handful of hours. Of course we don't actually know what the break point is but if someone has to play the game for twenty hours to cost more than they gave the dev then it could easily still be profitable. To me this screams gimic game that they're banking on people buying and playing for an afternoon and then never touching again but take my opinion with a grain of salt since I haven't done any real research into this one.
It depends. For AI, probably yes, but for example multiplayer matchmaking servers for one time payment games exists, and are fairly cheap, depending on the game, and trust between clients
You need trust between clients to allow it to go to p2p between them. Without it, you would need the server at more or less all time to say the state with authority. Without trust between the clients, you can't drop to a p2p connection later.
As you need the server to connect each other, if you dont want community server/local (VPN) only multiplayer, because it needs to know where each other is, and how to connect to them.
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u/MurkyWay 2d ago
Running your game at a loss seems like a bad idea