One of the many ways AI will (supposedly) revolutionise the games industry in facilitating highly reactive NPCs via LLM-powered chatbots. Yet so far, only a handful of games like Where Winds Meet have attempted to implement the tech, and the results have been less than spectacular. But there might also be another reason why relatively few games feature LLM-powered NPCs, which is that powering such chatbots can be costly, as recently demonstrated by the developers of an upcoming driving instructor simulator

As reported by FRVR (via Kotaku) Teach My Little Sister How To Drive is a comic simulation game in which you coach your virtual sibling on driving technique from the comfort of the passenger seat. The twist is that behind your sister's dinner-plate eyes is an LLM chatbot (currently powered by an OpenAI model, though the developers intend to use Gemini for the final release) In the role of instructor, players can both converse with the chatbot and issue vocal instructions such as "turn left here", to which the bot will respond accordingly. At least, that's the theory.

Developer Easy Fox released a demo for Teach My Little Sister How To Drive back in February, but in the past month the game has seen a surge in players, which has had an interesting knock-on effect for the demo. "The number of demo players has grown more than twentyfold," Easy Fox explained in a Steam post, adding. "This growth has also increased our operating costs considerably."

Easy Fox goes on to explain that it is "spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo", as players burn through tokens prompting the LLM by proxy.

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