AI Game Business Model Question

Gemini API
1

I have made an AI game that is a conversational role playing game. The problem is, the more players use it the more money I lose, the worse the players are the more money I lose, the longer they play it the more money I lose.

Charging people a flat fee won’t work, even a monthly subscription since the cost for each player will be so varied. The game is compelling and can keep people chatting with the AI for hours which is great for Google but is going to cost me a fortune. I don’t think even littering the page with banner ads would cover the API costs. The only thing I can think of to make this fair is if each player brings their own Gemini API key and enters that into my game like a password and then the tokens get billed directly to them. But that’s a big ask of the players to have to generate their own key and trust me with it.

Bottom line, there is no way I am covering the cost of all of these tokens for potentially the entire internet of users and I don’t see how any amount of advertising would ever cover the potential costs. Is there an actual AI business model that makes money for both the developer and Google?

2

I suppose this is also an architecture question because I need to make sure the context for each player stays separate and if all players are using the same shared API key won’t their conversation contexts get all mixed up?

So basically I need player’s games to be completely separate chat threads so does that mean those game sessions need to be using separate API keys?

Would really appreciate some guidance so I can roll this out!

3

After chatting with a few people it seems that direct to consumer AI conversations games cannot be profitable without some in-game currency that equates to tokens so users would need to continuously buy more in game currency to keep playing. Unless anyone has any better ideas I’m stuck with people needing to generate their own API keys in order to play which is only practical for B2B situations where I can hold their hands or do it for them. Sorry freemium world, AI conversational games are not for you.