Free Steam demo's AI bill tops $1,000 a day, devs take a bank loan
Easy Fox, the studio behind the free AI-powered Steam demo Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, says its daily AI service costs have passed $1,000 after its player count grew more than 20-fold, forcing it to take out a bank loan to keep the demo running; SteamDB shows concurrent players peaking at 431 on Oct. 1. The game uses Google Gemini to interpret voice commands, and after hitting usage limits it falls back to the less capable ChatGPT Realtime Mini 2.1, which the team says causes delayed responses and wrong inputs. The studio says the paid release will bake expected AI usage into the game's price rather than charging players for tokens, and it plans to offer local AI models for players with capable hardware.
It illustrates how token-based inference costs can make free or high-traffic AI features hard to sustain.