Four-person team's Steam demo runs up a $1,000-a-day AI bill, and the developer takes out a bank loan

Easy Fox, the developer of the conversational AI driving game Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, has taken out a bank loan to keep paying the AI costs of its free demo.

According to IGN and Kotaku on October 9, players ride in the passenger seat and teach the in-game sister to drive by talking to her, and she follows or ignores their instructions. The character runs on Google Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT.

In a Steam update the developer said "the number of demo players has grown more than twentyfold" over the past month, pushing operating costs up enough that it took out a loan. Running the demo costs more than $1,000 a day.

"We are a small team of four, and financial pressure may mean we have to close the demo earlier than expected before the full release," Easy Fox wrote, adding that no decision has been made. It plans to build expected AI usage into the full game's price rather than charge players for tokens, and is looking at letting capable PCs run a local model instead.

Dexerto's post about the story on October 11 passed 11,000 likes and 620,000 views. "Finally, a driving game where the developers make the car payments," one user replied.