The studio behind an upcoming AI-powered driving instructor simulator says it is now spending more than $1,000 per day on AI services just to keep its demo online after player numbers surged.
Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, from developer Easy Fox, is a comic simulation game in which players coach a virtual sibling on driving technique from the passenger seat. The twist is that the sister is driven by an LLM chatbot—currently powered by an OpenAI model, though the developers plan to switch to Gemini for the final release.
In the instructor role, players can converse with the chatbot and issue vocal commands such as “turn left here,” which it attempts to carry out. Easy Fox released a demo in February but says demand has since grown sharply.
The number of demo players has grown more than twentyfold.
This growth has also increased our operating costs considerably.Easy Fox
The studio told PC Gamer that it is now “spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” as players burn through tokens prompting the LLM by proxy. Easy Fox said this was not because each player is expensive to support, but rather because “so many people are playing.”
The financial strain has prompted Easy Fox to take out a bank loan to keep the demo running—and even warns it may have to shut it down early. “Financial pressure may mean we have to close the demo earlier than expected before the full release,” the studio said, though it stressed it had “not made that decision at this time.”
According to FRVR, the twentyfold increase amounts to 450 concurrent players. While overall numbers will be higher, Easy Fox says it will “account for expected AI usage in the game’s price,” and that players “will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.”
The studio is also exploring options such as introducing local AI models for players with “sufficiently capable GPUs”—though it acknowledges this would only serve a fraction of its player base. Easy Fox plans to release the full game in January next year.
Easy Fox says current design problems being addressed include “dialogue that feels too artificial and breaks immersion” and “commands being carried out incorrectly, such as turning right when asked to turn left.” The studio intends to release the full game in January 2026.
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