Games, on the other hand, are mostly funded via up-front purchase (so you get the money once and then have to keep the servers running) or free to play, which very carefully tracks user acquisition costs versus revenue. Most F2P games make a tiny amount per player; they make up the difference via volume (and whales). So even a handful of queries per day per player can bankrupt you if you have a million players and no way to recoup the inference cost.

Now, you can obviously add a subscription or ongoing charge to offset it, but that's not how the industry is mostly set up at the moment. I expect that the funding model will change, but meanwhile having a model on the edge device is the only currently realistic way to afford adding an LLM to a big single player RPG, for example.