THE CRUNCH
Easy Fox, the studio behind the free Steam demo Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, says it is spending more than $1,000 a day on AI services and has taken out a bank loan to keep the demo running. The game uses Google Gemini to listen to voice commands and generate responses, with ChatGPT as a fallback, and voice is the game's only control method, so the AI is central to how it plays. Player numbers grew more than 20 times what the team expected, with SteamDB showing an average count under 10 until late August, around 50 by late September and a peak of 431 on 1 October.
The studio stressed that the bill is a volume problem rather than an expensive player base. “This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running,” the team wrote in its Steam update.
Growth has also pushed the game into usage limits on Google Gemini, forcing it onto the less capable ChatGPT Realtime Mini 2.1 as a fallback. That has produced delayed responses and wrong inputs, and the studio says cheaper fallback models have injected slop into gameplay.
There is a plan for the full release: AI usage costs will be folded into the game's price, with no separate charges for individual token use after purchase. Easy Fox is also working on local AI models for players with capable hardware, so the game does not have to depend on external services and their limits. It is additionally testing alternative models for players in Russia, where sanctions make Western models hard to access.