I have done something of a deep dive of every game claiming to be currently using Generative AI and one of the things I’ve seen (beyond just how uncreative they all feel and that the only genre that seems to viable for the moment is “bad Tindr clone as game”) is the biggest problem seems to be economic.

“Generative AI is cheap” is the current narrative but not the reflected current reality. Most terrible free to start mobile games try to give an illusion that you can play for free for an hour or so a day before having to pay anything. The generative AI “games” all are limited to roughly no more than 15 minutes per day and many have hard paywalls only a few minutes in. I don’t think is a coincidence nor just scummy behavior by greedy cloners.

Generative AI is billed per token. The individual cost of a token seems cheap, but tokens add up quickly. The context windows you can provide have grown to be counted in the millions. That counts however many tokens in your prompt to setup the scenario. That counts however much “memory” you want to give it (for fidelity). It’s never just “I only need enough tokens for the user’s next response”. Not to mention you are charged for output tokens, too. If a user prompts and overly wordy and long response or an image you pay for that, too.

All of that adds up and it doesn’t seem like a surprise all these “games” attempting to use these tools are trying for subscription models and leaning heavily on micro-transactions at even the 5 or 10 minute mark.

I think cost is huge limiting factor right now in what games can do with “live” Generative AI despite the “Generative AI is cheap” hype. It certainly looks expensive at the scale of an entire playerbase right now.

There are some “SLMs” you could run on user devices but you trade off some of the “fidelity” people currently seem to like about the currently popular LLM models. You are also going to use up GBs of install space and a large chunk of your CPU and GPU budgets to try to run them. Given how feel people seem to want text only games, is it worth trading off all the graphics you could include in those budgets?

I did the deep dive because I was curious if there was a business model hiding in there somewhere and I came out of that feeling like there is not one and the opposite may be true Generative AI in games right now would mostly only be a great way to lose lots of money.