Cost & Sustainability

With great usage comes... great costs. The level of engagement is helping us get a handle on the resource demands of supporting AI-driven tools for creators. No one else has a feature quite like this, so there’s no template to follow. We’re learning by doing.

We launched Maker AI as an experimental feature for RR+ users to try out in their dorm. We wanted to get some real data on how people would use Maker AI. Right now, it looks like the money we’d spend to support a month of Maker AI for an individual is way higher than the RR+ net revenue we get from that subscription. RR+ players will continue to be able to use Maker AI in their dorm for the next month or so as we add new features, but we don’t plan to link Maker AI to RR+ when it’s fully released outside the Dorm. Doing so would leave us financially upside down on each player using Maker AI.

We want Maker AI to be accessible to everyone - whether you’re a new player who just wants to check it out or a pro who is looking for a consistent speed boost, and we need to find a business model that lets us offer that.

Additionally, over the coming months, we have a lot of optimization to do to bring down the costs of popular AI requests. As an example, texture generation is one of the most popular features but also one of the most expensive. If we can bring down the cost of that feature and others, we can bring down the overall cost of Maker AI for players when it releases as a standalone feature.

What’s Coming Next

Keep using Maker AI and keep giving us feedback. That usage is really valuable in helping us improve Maker AI. And we expect usage to ramp up even further as we roll out Maker AI’s new capability - circuit graph generation.

While it won’t be able to generate every circuit under the sun, it’s already surprising us with the quality and complexity of what it can build. As with all generative tools, there will be some trial and error—debugging, re-prompting, refinement.

Let Us Know What You Think

If you haven’t checked out Maker AI yet, give it a shot. It will stay Dorm room only for RR+ players for the next few weeks (just be warned, RR+ can trial this feature out before everyone else, but Maker AI will not be a RR+ feature upon full release), until we build a plan for Maker AI to be available everywhere.

So whether you're an experienced builder or just starting out, it's already proving to be a surprisingly fun and interesting tool for creativity. We especially enjoyed BearDaBear’s “Change something in the room and I’ll guess what you changed” game. Not what we were expecting…

From the moment I picked up my rectangular NES controller, I wanted to build games. That’s true for many people. If you play games, you have probably wanted to build games.

But building games is hard. Really hard.

Over the years, we've made building games way easier - 10% of our players create! However, we still haven’t made creation easy enough. 90% of our players don’t create.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing an experimental new feature named Maker AI. It is designed to make game and world creation a lot more accessible for aspiring creators. It’s like having a skilled creator friend, who is always online (and has infinite patience for your requests). For advanced creators, we think it has the potential to make building significantly faster by giving you another creator who you can delegate tasks to.

Here’s a quick overview of how it works:

🤖 Maker AI - spawn, place and alter any object

If you want something, all you need to do is ask. Maker AI is spatially aware of the room and it knows about the millions of items in the library. Maker AI can move them around, resize them, change their color or their texture.

👾 Maker AI, a game building partner

Maker AI is a powerful collaborator when building games. It can alter environments and lighting. It can create and apply behaviors to objects, set up game rules and objectives. This can massively speed up your building process.

The more we've looked at AI, the more we believe it can have a big impact on UGC and gaming.

Building with Maker AI has made me feel like we're all shipping DVDs in red envelopes and there's this "streaming technology" on the horizon that might change the way people use our service in the future.

Will Maker AI allow 100% of our players to build games? Maybe. We certainly think it will help them get their dorm rooms looking much sharper.

If you’ve never built anything in Rec Room, we’re interested to learn if Maker AI is an easier onramp to the rest of the toolset.

Will Maker AI allow our best creators to build in an afternoon what used to take a week? We hope so. As you’ve probably seen with other AI products, they’re fascinatingly powerful and also frustratingly unpredictable. Still, they’re getting better each day.

If you’re already a pro creator, we’d love for you to take a look and let us know what Maker AI could do to make your next build faster and easier. We'd like to hear your feedback in the Maker AI channel on our Creator Hub Discord.

We’re excited to get your thoughts after spending some time with Maker AI in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

FAQ

Are these videos real?

Yes. These are all live video captures on our test environment using real code in real time.

Can I use these features socially?

That's the plan. We still want people to build socially. We think that's the most fun way to go about it and Maker AI is just one more creator in your group.

Is Maker AI an English-only tool?

Maker AI will respond to pretty much any language you throw at it.

Does this work on all platforms?

Maker AI will work on any platform that has a microphone

Is this a paid feature?

Unrestricted access to Maker AI will be a RR+ feature to start. The cost of the compute for Maker AI adds up with heavy use. Over time we see opportunities to optimize the models and get them running more efficiently which should bring down our costs and potentially allow for a free tier.

When are these features going to ship?

You'll start seeing portions of Maker AI in the coming weeks, specifically the features in that first video. To start, Maker AI will only be available in your dorm room. We want to make sure we understand the trust and safety implications of these features before letting it operate in a more open setting or publish rooms. The features in the bottom videos will go out later as they are refined and optimized in testing.