We are currently not or barely covering our costs with Patreon AI subscription (depending on the traffic), as hosting an AI which is fast enough for real time conversation costs at least in the range of 500-1000$ / month, and subscribers for the AI tear are less than 100.
For physic issues: These are fundamental issues we constantly work on, but current SOTA physic engines have some limits of what you can do. And changing engine does not help with this, as there are no real alternatives on the market. Unreal Engine is slowly getting usable, as they are implementing their own engine, but we are using Unity like most Indie devs, which is using PhysX from NVIDIA.
""For physic issues: These are fundamental issues we constantly work on, but current SOTA physic engines have some limits of what you can do. And changing engine does not help with this, as there are no real alternatives on the market.""
constantly working on this for 4 years... sure... then why is it the same mess as it was in 2022 for example... it hasn't improved much if at all, when does the limitations end? - never? whats the point - its pretty clear you wont get a big playerbase with a broken game, maybe after 4 more years there will be alternative engines and after 4 more years after that you might have your game on such engine working properly, but thats 8 years with 100-200players if even thats left by then.
I don't have the data to question your cost and your earnings and what you are covering and whatnot, but I stand behind what I said - the game in the state that it is - its just not worth it with A.I. convo or not and thats pretty obvious, because almost noone is buying and almost noone is playing it consistently for a long time, because at some point you get tired of how bad its running and whats happening. New content is not a bad thing, but when its new content on top of broken basics and physics for 4 years then whats the point.
Make the game 5-10$ during sales when Steam has other big discount campaigns and give 1 month free trial to the A.I. conversations and things might start to move in a positive direction.
This may seem harsh, but I used to care about the game and maybe I still do a little, otherwise why would I bother writing all this... so take it as constructive criticism if you will or just ignore, its np.