OpenChess

Tord wrote: The market for chess programs for mobile phones is huge. It has never been easier and cheaper to reach big amounts of customers than now.

Yep.

As an example, Stockfish for iOS has been downloaded by 5479 customers over the last four weeks. Of course this is a free app, and the number of downloads would no doubt have been lower if I charged a dollar or two for it, but even if we assume that only half of the 5479 customers would have been willing to pay one dollar for it, it would add up to a substantial amount of money for just one month.

Make that 3-5% max.

This really is the golden age of computer chess, from a commercial perspective. Programmers just have to wake up and realise that nobody plays chess on a PC anymore.

The golden age of computer chess is long gone. These were the late 70's and 80's (dedicated units) and the 90's (PC), I agree with Chris, after 1997 (Kasparov - Deep Blue) turnovers rapidly went in decline.

But I agree with you the future of commercial chess programs already has moved to mobile phones (already quite saturated too IMO) and the new future will be in Androids / IPAD's. It must be possible to have a reasonable income provided you do a good marketing job.

Posts on this thread that were off-topic were reported as "disgusting", they have been split to a new thread at Everything Else:

http://www.open-chess.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1123

Rebel wrote:

hyatt wrote: Vas has simply not contributed any information of any kind. Writing a program is not a contribution to computer chess. It does zero to further progress. It _is_ a contribution to chess in general, since any strong chess player contributes games and similar. But _not_ to computer chess.

Nowadays contributing an .exe is good enough.

More like indirect (forced) contribution.

Uly wrote:Posts on this thread that were off-topic were reported as "disgusting", they have been split to a new thread at Everything Else:

http://www.open-chess.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1123

Thanks!