all my apes gone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwZ6_Q2lnsc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261012-ai-game-demo-going-broke-on-just-430-players - podcast
time: 4 min 47 sec
I think the headline is a mistake. I believe that’s peak simultaneous players, not total.
Not convinced that makes any substantive difference.
It depends on how it plays. If thousands of people keep trying it for short periods of time the business model is less stupid than if a few hundred people play it nearly 24/7. Like are they spending 70 dollars per potential sale or 3?
Is an arc of play 3 hours or 60? etc.
Also just generally when people are being stupid it’s funnier to describe what they’re doing accurately.
They’re spending about $70 per month per player.
The developers have taken out a bank loan to keep the demo running. A free demo where the whole way the game works relies on a paid service.
The financial end game here is not clear. Who will pay for this in the release version? The developers think the players will.
Can’t wait for these jokers to learn the hard way that they don’t understand The Market.
Man, every time I hear about the cost of an actual AI application, it is always something obscene. At least this isn’t as bad as Steve “Gas Town” Yegge spending $30k/year for a dozen subscriptions (that cost Anthropic ~$1M/year in token costs) to develop his game with 6 active players.
At this point I have zero patience for my colleagues who think that the AI companies could make the economics all work out. Doesn’t help that mathematicians are the least cost-conscious people on the planet, and the AI companies are massively subsidizing their subscriptions in particular.
You know the funny thing? They’re all competing hardcore right now selling below cost so they can become monopolies, the more they get used the more data so the better their product becomes, so the prices they’re spending are lower than they should be.
Literally ai investors are eating the cost of people using a shit ton of AI for dumb questions or being lazy and letting ai do stuff like summarize cooking recipes that users could just read on their own.
It’s cheaper now than it’ll ever be, and whatever comes back after bubble bursting will be more expensive likely, something where you don’t want to spend that much to code a feature that you can just figure out on your own.
Absolutely incredible. Easily the funniest thing I read today. It’s like a perfect micro-example of the AI bubble.
Epic idiocy.
That’s at the investor subsidized rate as well.
Huh, this video got flagged as mature content. Unusual move for this channel…
whaaat? I’m not seeing that in my channel interface and it’s not showing as such in a private window. What are you seeing?
