The developer behind Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, a driving instruction sim where you instruct a generative-AI-powered, dynamic NPC, has been spending $1,000 dollars a day to keep the demo working.
The developer behind Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, a driving instruction sim where you instruct a generative-AI-powered, dynamic NPC, has been spending $1,000 dollars a day to keep the demo working.
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.
You’re still opening up for credentials to be harvested and troll requested by script kiddos
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.
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
If the game uses the Steam SDK, they “of course” can at least check that the request comes from an authorized game (SSO via Steam). But sure, people who bought the game can still easily troll the dev, unless they also employ some kind of anti-cheat system. But from what it sounds like even then a troll could simply play the game excessively and then ramp up costs for the dev.