Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as you approach your 20th birthday.
Chess.com, an online chess platform founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has over 200 million members. Of these 200 million members, 1.5 million pay for users. Over 20 million chess is played every day on the platform.
“[Chess has] Chess.com's Chief Growth Officer, Albert Cheng, told TechCrunch. “It's been performing for over 1,500 years. And even Chess.com is not a brand new company. It's been around for almost 20 years. I feel it's really dynamic.”
The company has expanded much since its roots as an online forum for IRL chess players to discuss games. Chess.com offers complete chess matches with others and bots, daily games and puzzles, news about the world of chess, the ability to stream chess competitions and more.
Cheng is praised for the company's continued product innovation as one of the reasons it saw strong and sustained growth. For example, the company released the AI Game Review feature in 2021. Yes, there is always an angle of AI. This uses AI to summarise how players have done in the game and flag potential improvements. He added that while the majority of new users on Chess.com are beginners and the platform is designed for players of all levels, such features will help these new members develop a love for the game.
The company has also managed to ride the growing interest in chess over the past few years. Chess, along with many other games, gained much popularity during the pandemic. In response, Chess.com had to raise its infrastructure in large quantities to support new demand.
Netflix's chess-centric miniseries, The Queen's Gambit, sparked even more interest when it was released in 2020. Since then, many events have attracted renewed interest in the game. In 2022, the world of chess was shaken by a fraud scandal that included world champion Magnus Carlsen. Competitive chess will also be featured at the esports World Cup for the first time this year.
The game is also becoming increasingly global, with around 85% of new user registrations saying that Gukesh Dommaraju, the current world champion from outside the US, is from India.
Cheng – Cheng, former head of product, growth and monetization at Grammarly and Duolingo, adds that he appears to be listening to new “high-profile” chess players every day, and plays each other's recent chess matches online with Formula 1 racing stars Lewis Hamilton and Charles LeClair.
“The sky is the limit here and we're foolish not to explore it so much that we can continue to grow the game by leveraging the organic interest already present in these adjacent communities,” Chen said. “So I'm really excited about those opportunities.”