ChessCube Update: A message from the CEO

[bryan]

I never intended to post here anything as English is not my mother tongue but sorry, I cannot stand anymore all those whiners....

Thanks robinowitsch for your kind words and great attitude. ChessCube has been online for many years now and more "subtle" ways of trying to generate revenue have not worked very well. Users have been more than happy to play and chat as much as they want without consideration of how this is all paid for.

So now that we implement measures that try to address the very real costs involved many find it patently offensive that we would try to get them to pay anything. It is strange that so many have this sense of entitlement when they have not in any way paid for the services they freely use every day

That being said, we do hope that people who don't want to pay will hang around - and this can be achieved if generous and considerate customers such as yourself continue to support ChessCube financially. Ultimately it does not take that many VIPs to make this all work and make everyone happy.

So the bottom line is that: if you can afford and want to pay for ChessCube services in order to keep ChessCube growing and improving, then THANKS WHOLEHEARTEDLY for your patronage. If you cannot afford to or don't want to pay for ChessCube services, then at least please understand the limitations you face and hopefully the paying supporters of ChessCube will eventually cover all the costs you add to the server on your behalf.

Yes i am not Happy with this. If u want to do this then how can you provide us a free games ? As you said that we keep providing free services. I don't want to play 2 or 3 games a day. This is not fair with Normal Member. Who is able to pay he will defiantly buy your services. And i can understand about your website maintenance and services. And i am happy be to a Member. But i think you need to think more about Member.
And i am sure that you will get defiantly a good and much better then this idea.

THANKS A LOT

It is strange that so many have this sense of entitlement when they have not in any way paid for the services they freely use every day

Hey Bryan - Ever consider how much seed funding CC would have gotten were it not for all those free members? What's most enticing to CC investors: annual payments from 200 members or thousands of free members swarming the site each day?

[bryan]

Hey Bryan - Ever consider how much seed funding CC would have gotten were it not for all those free members? What's most enticing to CC investors: annual payments from 200 members or thousands of free members swarming the site each day?

Seed funding happened when there were very few users, and the very niche nature of a "chess site" does not make it that appealing to "big guys" - we are not trying to solve universal issues here (like search, generic social networking or micro-blogging), so the entire market of potential users is not as large as you might suspect... still ChessCube can and hopefully will be successful despite this. I just don't see that the "swarming" as you put it on a chess site reaching the numbers that would make VCs take notice.

What are we hitting these days? Between 3 and 4 thousand concurrent? And if we did amazingly, we might hit 10 k? (Would be possibly the biggest chess website on the net at that number!) But is 10k that much compared to other web sites out there?

Hey Bryan - Ever consider how much seed funding CC would have gotten were it not for all those free members? What's most enticing to CC investors: annual payments from 200 members or thousands of free members swarming the site each day?

Seed funding happened when there were very few users, and the very niche nature of a "chess site" does not make it that appealing to "big guys" - we are not trying to solve universal issues here (like search, generic social networking or micro-blogging), so the entire market of potential users is not as large as you might suspect... still ChessCube can and hopefully will be successful despite this. I just don't see that the "swarming" as you put it on a chess site reaching the numbers that would make VCs take notice.

What are we hitting these days? Between 3 and 4 thousand concurrent? And if we did amazingly, we might hit 10 k? (Would be possibly the biggest chess website on the net at that number!) But is 10k that much compared to other web sites out there?

Might I suggest that perhaps you're trying to solve the wrong problem here, rather than capitalising on your strengths?

An example of ChessCube's strengths: I just downloaded the video 20:20 CALCULATION by GM Danny King, to play in the excellent ChessCube Cinema software.

ChessCube Cinema videos are both more convenient (much more convenient) and cheaper than DVDs.

They don't require storage space (except for a few megabytes on a HDD) which DVDs do. They take only a short time to download. They automatically transfer to your new machine when you replace your old one.

So...all in all here is a product which is both superior to and cheaper than rival products....

Hmmm, ChessCube may be on to something, here.

Now, please excuse me, I'm going to watch GM King....

Mod edit:...excessive quote... just quote what is needed...

Hats off, great post.


Myself, I get the feeling chesscube wants to solve the server problem by reducing player base

I never intended to post here anything as English is not my mother tongue but sorry, I cannot stand anymore all those whiners....

Thanks robinowitsch for your kind words and great attitude. ChessCube has been online for many years now and more "subtle" ways of trying to generate revenue have not worked very well. Users have been more than happy to play and chat as much as they want without consideration of how this is all paid for.

So now that we implement measures that try to address the very real costs involved many find it patently offensive that we would try to get them to pay anything. It is strange that so many have this sense of entitlement when they have not in any way paid for the services they freely use every day

That being said, we do hope that people who don't want to pay will hang around - and this can be achieved if generous and considerate customers such as yourself continue to support ChessCube financially. Ultimately it does not take that many VIPs to make this all work and make everyone happy.

So the bottom line is that: if you can afford and want to pay for ChessCube services in order to keep ChessCube growing and improving, then THANKS WHOLEHEARTEDLY for your patronage. If you cannot afford to or don't want to pay for ChessCube services, then at least please understand the limitations you face and hopefully the paying supporters of ChessCube will eventually cover all the costs you add to the server on your behalf.

I have no problem paying for a good service. But this policy makes me less likely to buy a VIP membership because I'm afraid traffic will decrease and I'll have fewer opponents to play. I personally pledge to buy VIP for a year if this 10 cubit thing is reversed, but for now I'm going to hold off and see how things shake out...

hi guys,

I suggest that paying the crowns for membership should also be made through money transfer-(courier), Being a student I dont have credit card but I can make the payment through western union. Most of the members in our place like to avail of the membership but only the mode of payment is quite difficult for students.

cute Claire

[bryan]

I have no problem paying for a good service. But this policy makes me less likely to buy a VIP membership because I'm afraid traffic will decrease and I'll have fewer opponents to play. I personally pledge to buy VIP for a year if this 10 cubit thing is reversed, but for now I'm going to hold off and see how things shake out...

Sure, some people say this, by why did it take this new policy before they budged? Whatever that underlying reason is, is why the previous policy is unaffordable.

[bryan]

So...all in all here is a product which is both superior to and cheaper than rival products....

You may well be very right on the superiority of some of our products, but you are strangely unaware of our userbase - the vast majority are not that interested in video learning - they just want to play and chat. Getting a heart icon in chat is likely more incentive for many than getting a Daniel King video. Interestingly chess.com went the other way than we did when presented with only chess or chat to try to monetize - they limit number of times you can chat in 30 seconds