Scaling Laws - 0.5.0 - Serving people pays for itself

Six days of work, and most of it went into one thing: the economy was paying the wrong player.

Download: ScalingLaws-0.5.0-Windows.zip, 167 MB zipped and 435 MB on disk.
Unzip the whole folder and run Scaling Laws.exe. Windows 64 bit. No installer and no launcher.

Saves: a 0.4.0 campaign loads and keeps its history. The format moves from v56 to v62 and every step in between is a real migration rather than a reset. Where a migration has to invent a value the old format never stored, it takes the least flattering reading that is still defensible and records what it did.

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Two numbers on one screen that could not both be true

A campaign with 3.4 million users reported 11% of its servers in use.

The top bar was right. The band under the rent slider had a hand-written forty petaflops per million accounts in it and sized a person by the market's average appetite for tokens, 93,000 a day, against my own consumers getting through 12,000.

A factor of eight, under the control a player drags when they are deciding whether the product stays up.

One definition of a person now: the top bar, the rent slider, reserved packages, creator and server room all ask the same method.

Charging twenty five times the market rate was free

Two identical fourteen-year campaigns:

Subscription	Finished on
$80 a month, the market rate on day one	$3.6bn
$2,000 a month	$480bn

Four separate places clamped the price a customer feels at ten times the market while the till charged the full figure, so the strongest strategy in the game was to price yourself out of the market and serve almost nobody.

Three more faults pushed the same way:

• Serving a token got cheaper for the market every year and never for you. Inference efficiency is on the calendar now: batching and FP8 in 2023, paged attention and speculative decoding in 2024, FP4 and KV compression in 2025.
• The default subscription drifted to five hundred times the market rate by 2029 on its own, because its token allowance was fixed while people got heavier. It follows real usage now.
• Reputation was a share of a world that grows fifty times over. It is a headcount: two million people served a day is full marks.

Every audience now has a paying share. An API key is billed for every token it spends, a consumer assistant is free for almost everybody. Reach and revenue stopped being the same number.

Added

• The parts warehouse has a door, one full-width button at the top of the room's rail.
• BUY opens an order window instead of spending the money on the click: units, price each, total, delivery date, and one slider that trades up to +50% on the price for up to -85% of the wait. Nothing about the frontier moves because you paid extra.
• The creator says what a model will do to your own cluster, in people, on the scale page and in the release window, and the line turns amber when the new model would serve fewer than the one on sale.
• The site's power ceiling is visible before an order is refused by it.
• The region page says which mouse button does what.
• Credits, and the testers under SETTINGS in the main menu.

Changed

• Rented and reserved capacity share one line, half the page each.
• The rent meter's delivered bar measures the rented half, not the whole fleet.
• The house is lit: pale oak, plaster, brushed metal and a floor with something to reflect.
• The staff are re-seated on every refresh, so a company that moves takes its people with it.

Fixed

• The same scandal ran every thirty days for the rest of the campaign. One probe log carried the identical sentence thirty times.
• The introduction had a SKIP button and hid it from everybody who wanted it, because it was gated on having already watched the opening once. It is there from the first frame now.
• Twelve notes in the creator and six headings on the model tables were English on a Polish screen.

Under the hood

49 days since the first commit. 483 commits. 111,209 lines of C# in the game, 23,800 in the editor tooling, 43,319 in the tests.

1,423 EditMode tests across 164 fixtures and 69 PlayMode tests across 15. No EditMode test loads a scene.
PlayabilityTests plays a scripted multi-year campaign and fails the build if a reasonable player could not survive it; DeepCampaignProbe plays nine campaigns of fourteen years and prints what happened, which is how every balance fault above was found.

Licence: source available, all rights reserved. Read it, build it privately, quote it with a link. Builds and source are not for redistribution.

Supporting the Steam launch

Listing the game on Steam costs Valve's $100 registration fee, and that is the whole reason there is a fund.
The counter on the site and on GitHub is the same figure I am looking at, and it runs until 19 October 2026.

From 40 zł you are in the supporter pack: your name in the credits and in the SUPPORTERS section of the menu.

https://github.com/sponsors/HuckleR2003

The game stays free here whatever the fund does.