Designing a Fair Credit System for AI-Generated Content

Monetization in games is a minefield. Get it wrong and you alienate players. Get it right and you build something sustainable. Here's how we think about it, and how it's actually built.

The Core Principle

Text gameplay is free. Period.

You can create characters, play adventures, make choices, and experience the full narrative without spending anything. The AI Game Master, the lore retrieval, the inventory, the stats, dice rolls, all free. You will never hit a paywall that blocks you from continuing your story.

What Costs Credits

Credits are used for AI generation of multimedia content:

• Portrait generation — Creating AI art of your character
• Scene images — Illustrations of your current environment
• Sound effects — AI-generated audio for dramatic moments
• Voice lines — NPC speech with AI-generated voices

These features are genuinely expensive to produce, they call out to third-party generation APIs on every miss. Credits fund that cost.

Credit Transparency

Every message in the gameplay UI shows exactly how many credits it consumed. A small badge displays the cost for each message that used credits, scene images, sound effects, ambient sounds, voice lines. You always know what you're spending, with no surprises, and the pricing page shows the full cost table up front, cache hit or miss, per operation.

The Caching Advantage

Here's where our model gets interesting: cached content is free.

If an image, sound effect, or voice line has already been generated (for any player) and matches closely enough, the cached version is served at no cost. Popular scenes, common sound effects, and frequently spoken lines all become free for everyone over time. The more people play, the more content becomes free.

Monthly Credits, and Where the Numbers Live

Every user, including free users, gets a monthly credit allowance (100 credits for the free tier). Subscribers get a larger allowance defined by their plan. A scheduled Postgres job resets everyone's allowance on the 1st of each month, so there's always a reason to come back, and subscription credits are consumed before purchased ones and expire on reset, while purchased credit packs never expire.

One deliberate engineering decision: Stripe is the source of truth for pricing. Subscription tiers and credit packages are Stripe products with metadata (credit amounts, discounts, feature lists), not rows duplicated in our own database. We fetch and cache that data from the Stripe API rather than maintaining a parallel pricing table that could drift out of sync. Our database only stores the account-level state: which Stripe customer you are, and your current subscription and purchased credit balances.

The "Free First" Philosophy

For expensive operations like portrait generation, we offer free generations per character. You can create a character and generate their portrait without spending credits. Want to regenerate for a different look? The first few are free. After that, credits kick in.

This ensures every player gets to experience the full Embertold experience at least once, regardless of their financial situation.

Subscription Tiers

Subscribers get a larger monthly credit allowance and a discount on credit pack purchases. But critically, subscribers don't get gameplay advantages. A free player and a subscriber play the same game with the same AI. The subscriber just gets more immersion: more images, more sounds, more voices.

Why Not Ads?

Ads break immersion. You can't lose yourself in a fantasy world if there's a banner ad for car insurance at the bottom of the screen. We'd rather build a sustainable model around the genuine value of premium features than compromise the experience with advertising.

The Long Game

Our goal is to make Embertold better with every session played. Credits fund the infrastructure that makes this possible. Caching ensures the investment of early players benefits everyone who comes after.

It's not a perfect system, no monetization model is. But we believe it's an honest one: pay for what you use, benefit from what others have generated, and always have access to the core experience for free.