Games & Media
High call volume, tight latency budgets, and characters that answer the same question thousands of times a day.
Games invert the usual economics. Individual calls are small; there are simply an enormous number of them, and the per-call overhead you would ignore elsewhere becomes the whole bill.
Volume makes the tier decision dominant
When a call is cheap and constant, the gap between an adequate model and a maximal one multiplies by call count. Most in-world dialogue, state summarisation and intent classification does not need a frontier model, and choosing per call is where the money is.
The prompt is mostly fixed
Character sheets, world rules and tone guidance are re-sent on every interaction and barely change between them. That is the ideal shape for cache reuse, and the most expensive thing to get wrong — a routing decision that discards the cache can cost more than the cheaper model saved. The Gateway weighs both.
Latency is a constraint, not a preference
A cheaper model is usually also a faster one, so the routing that lowers the bill generally lowers response time as well. Where it does not, you pin the workload.
Where to start
A waste audit answers this with your numbers rather than ours. Nothing to install, and you keep the findings either way.
This page describes where cost concentrates in this kind of workload. It is not a claim about customers in this sector — Operant is pre-launch and has none to name.