Chess.com reaches a new milestone of membership when it is approaching the 20th birthday.
Chess.comThe online chess platform, which was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, exceeded 200 million members. Of these 200 million members, 1.5 million pay users. Every day, over 20 million chess games are played on the platform.
“(Chess) gained this durability,” said Techcrunch Albert Cheng, Growth Director at Chess.com. “Playing for over 1500 years, which is simply amazing. And even Chess.com is not a completely new company. It's been for almost 20 years. It's really dynamic.”
The company has expanded very much from its roots as an IRL online chess forum to discuss their matches. Chess.com now offers full chess matches with other people or bots, daily games and puzzles, news about the chess world, the ability to send stream chess competitions and more.
Cheng assigns the company's continuous innovation as one of the reasons why he noted strong and lasting growth. For example, the company has published the AI review function in 2021 – Yes, there is always AI angle – which uses artificial intelligence to summarize how the player got in the game and to mark potential improvements. He added that most new users in Chess.com are a beginner, and although the platform is intended for players at all levels, such functions can help develop the game for these new members.
Over the past few years, the company has also been able to ride chess more interest. Chess and many other games have gained great popularity during a pandemic, because people were looking for ways to entertain through the Covid-19 lock. In response, Chess.com had to submit his infrastructure to be able to support the new demand.
The miniseries oriented on chess Netflix, “The Queen's Gambit”, additionally fueled interest when it was released in 2020. Since then, many events aroused new interest in the game. In 2022, the world of chess was shocked Cheating scandal with the participation of the five -time world champion Magnus Carlsen. Competitive chess will also be presented in the ESPORTS World Cup for the first time this year.
The game has also become more and more global, said Cheng, and about 85% of new users' new registration leave the current world champion, Guksh Dommaj, comes from India.
Cheng-was the head of the product, height and monetization in Grammarly and Duolingo-added that he seemed to hear about the new “loud” chess every day and quoted the last chess match between F1 Racing Stars Stars Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc Playing chess online with each other.
“I think that the sky is a limit here, and the more we can develop the game, using this organic interest that already exists in these neighboring communities, we would be stupid not to discover it,” said Cheng. “So I'm very excited about these possibilities.”
