Free Steam demo runs up $1,000 daily AI bill and forces devs to take out bank loan

Easy Fox, the developers behind a free, AI-powered game demo on Steam, has been forced to take out a bank loan as more players tried out its title. The game, called Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, uses Google Gemini to listen to your voice commands and generate responses, with ChatGPT serving as a fallback system. In its latest update, Easy Fox said that the number of players trying out the game has grown over 20 times, which is more than what it expected. This led its costs to skyrocket to more than a thousand dollars daily, and cheaper fallback AI models have led to slop injected into gameplay, impacting the user experience.

SteamDB showed an average player count of under 10 people until late August, when it started gaining steam. By late September, this had ballooned to around 50 players, before finally hitting a peak of 431 on Oct. 1. …