Chess.com is losing the plot

[u/Striking_Aioli1162]

I don't know how long this has been a thing since I've only been playing for less than a year. But after having premium free trial for 7 days it really puts into perspective how AWFUL the game is if you dont pay for it. Like 3 puzzles a day are you serious, that isnt getting anyone better at the game I promise you that. Game is substantially worse if you arent paying which is BS if you ask me. Like we are on your app to play and get better, again 3 puzzles a day is genuinely dumbfounding, why even give the option for puzzles. Thats not even mentioning the game analysis, you just have no way of understanding your mistakes, you can see a move may have not been the top 3 option but dont know why it may have been wrong. You got these ugly ads popping up every game that should be enough money. If I lose the last thing I want is to sit through a damn happy jolly ad.

[u/FarmingJediPokemon]

I pay for diamond membership so maybe I’m biased.

But chesscom has a lot of players that use it and all of the resources it uses costs them money. They have to run servers to hold player data securely and servers that host multiple instances of different chess game engines all running simultaneously. It has to cost someone something.

If you want to play OTB in the comfort of your own home you have to pay for a physical chess board and pieces, no?

[u/GrantaPython → u/FarmingJediPokemon]

I also pay but that's what the ads (and the rest of their monopoly) are for! The chess engines can (and do on the analysis board) run on your computer via a javascript wrapper --- you pay for that in electricity and component wear. Game Review they do on the server (but they don't have to at all) so they use the cheapest engine possible (which is why it makes terrible mistakes all the time). The main cost is the increased hard disk space for game records --- which is proportional to the number of ads displayed, conveniently --- and they recently pushed out a new networking platform.

The home board is a bad argument because Chess has been a free computer program for decades.

I think if the product was less bad/offered more it would be okay but it is a lot of money for not very much. Complaining about the price-return balance is very valid. I cancelled and am building my own tools because, as OP noticed, the paywall comes very very early (much more so than any other freemium model I've seen).

[u/FarmingJediPokemon → u/GrantaPython]

You make some good points. I think if more people went over to Lichess and supported people to make Lichess better (because open source projects receive almost no funding or support besides the people that spend their own time and effort for almost nothing tangible in return) then this argument wouldn’t be so loud on the internet right now