We tested closed and open models by asking them to build small, playable games.
Open models were much cheaper and faster, while producing games that were often close in quality.
โ Opus 4.8 was 15x more expensive than MiniMax M3
โ GPT-5.5 was 10x more expensive than Nemotron Ultra
โ Kimi K2.7 Code was 7x cheaper than Opus 4.8
For more workloads, the closed-to-open shift is becoming hard to ignore: strong quality, better tokenomics, and faster inference.
