Earlier this year, an AI driving simulation game called Teaching My Sister to Drive began to gain popularity. Players can only sit in the passenger seat the entire time and use voice commands to direct an AI-powered “sister” to drive, helping her pass various driving-school levels. But as you can imagine, it isn’t easy, because the AI sister often ignores instructions and acts out in all sorts of erratic ways, leading to all kinds of hilarious outcomes. However, according to a recent announcement from the development team Easy Fox, the free demo version offered for the game has burned through a massive number of Tokens, and they are even facing a financial crisis because of it.
In the past month alone, the demo’s player count grew more than 20-fold. We’re very grateful for the attention everyone has given this game, which far exceeded our expectations. At the same time, however, this growth has also significantly increased our operating costs.
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In the original design, Easy Fox connected players’ chat requests to Google’s Gemini chatbot, but because players did not pay any extra fees when downloading and playing the demo, they quickly triggered usage limit errors, and Google officially informed Easy Fox of this phenomenon right away. To improve the issue, the development team decided to switch to rival OpenAI’s models while trying to solve Gemini’s usage problem. However, the problem that truly plunged Easy Fox into crisis was maintenance costs.
According to Easy Fox officially, right after the player count for the Teaching My Sister to Drive demo skyrocketed, they had to take out a bank loan to keep that version running and even had to spend as much as $1,000 per day on AI service fees. Even so, the development team still promised players that when the full version of Teaching My Sister to Drive goes on sale, the team plans to include the estimated AI usage costs in the game’s price itself, so players will not need to pay separately for personal AI token usage fees after buying the base game.
In recent years, more and more game developers have begun using AI to create game assets or assist with backend code, but Teaching My Sister to Drive directly incorporates AI technology itself into its gameplay, aiming to give players a more varied interactive experience. However, they have also incurred high costs for this.
Even so, Easy Fox still hopes to continue offering a demo of Teaching My Sister to Drive so more players can try it for themselves. But given that Easy Fox is an ultra-small indie team of four, they may also be forced to shut down the demo early due to financial pressure and other issues. As for the exact release date and pricing details for the full version, nothing has been determined yet.
Source: KOCPC Chinese