-- WARNING, LONG POST FROM A NON-NATIVE SPEAKER MEMBER OF THE LICHESS TEAM, WHO JUST WANTS TO EXPRESS HIS OWN (AND NONE ELSE'S POSSIBLY) OPINION
What I think is that our goal is much more selective, we want to be the best place to play live chess. We specialize in giving you a beautiful and responsive platform.
chess.com has one big advantage that probably will always keep the vast majority of players there: the domain name.
On the other hand, keeping up with such a neat domain name requires them to have a much wider approach.
They need to be a place that can deal with every aspect of chess itself. We do not want to be that, we will not deal with that kind of responsibility. Everything considered, they have been doing it pretty well for years.
Again, they need money for that and they will be able to offer features like sponsoring live broadcasts, having GMs commentating, having paid broadcasts. That's not our goal, but I'm glad someone is doing that.
This is why I see a better comparison not between lichess and chess.com but for example between chess.com and chess24, they try to do the same things and they both charge users a lot of money to do so.
As a result, the content they can provide is very good, but IMHO arguably superior to what you can find for free on youtube (see SaintLouisChessClub lectures, long life Ben Finegold!)
-- That said, my experience on chess24 was very brief. I jumped on their site, I realized how small the board is by default compared to how astigmatic I am so I tried to make it bigger, they asked me 90 bucks a year to do that. And that's it I came back to lichess, home sweet home I can have a huge board here.
Lichess has been growing faster than we expected, people here appreciate how good the service we provide is. It's not about winning the value for money contest, we don't seek excuses. We aim to both be free and be the best value around.
Anyway, there is one thing that makes me very satisfied of the numbers we are reaching here.
I'm happy we haven't been the first playground for most of you. As the vast majority of our users, when I decided to learn how to push some wood I typed chess on google and jumped on chess.com.
It sounded good to me and I ended up playing my first 300/400 games there.
I'm glad I'm the kind of person that constantly seeks for improvement. That will made me look for a better alternative and eventually find this site.
Other sites have been around for much longer than we did, and people are very cautious about one particular thing: CHANGE.
People don't change, unless they really feel they can get some huge profit in doing so.
All of the people here didn't just happen to join lichess, they were players of many other sites who decided to give us a chance and eventually fell in love not only with the site features, but with the idea behind lichess. Namely, behind the "li" in lichess.
More than 1500 users everyday choose lichess because they are seeking for improvement, and I want to thank all of you who did so.
We are a huge community of people who don't settle with the first thing we could get away with, love the internet and don't want to pollute it with ads and popups stating your plan isn't VIP enough to do what you wanted to do, love chess and the fine coding by our benevolent dictator.
We have a lot to share!
Thanks for reading all of this, peace.
What I think is that our goal is much more selective, we want to be the best place to play live chess. We specialize in giving you a beautiful and responsive platform.
chess.com has one big advantage that probably will always keep the vast majority of players there: the domain name.
On the other hand, keeping up with such a neat domain name requires them to have a much wider approach.
They need to be a place that can deal with every aspect of chess itself. We do not want to be that, we will not deal with that kind of responsibility. Everything considered, they have been doing it pretty well for years.
Again, they need money for that and they will be able to offer features like sponsoring live broadcasts, having GMs commentating, having paid broadcasts. That's not our goal, but I'm glad someone is doing that.
This is why I see a better comparison not between lichess and chess.com but for example between chess.com and chess24, they try to do the same things and they both charge users a lot of money to do so.
As a result, the content they can provide is very good, but IMHO arguably superior to what you can find for free on youtube (see SaintLouisChessClub lectures, long life Ben Finegold!)
-- That said, my experience on chess24 was very brief. I jumped on their site, I realized how small the board is by default compared to how astigmatic I am so I tried to make it bigger, they asked me 90 bucks a year to do that. And that's it I came back to lichess, home sweet home I can have a huge board here.
Lichess has been growing faster than we expected, people here appreciate how good the service we provide is. It's not about winning the value for money contest, we don't seek excuses. We aim to both be free and be the best value around.
Anyway, there is one thing that makes me very satisfied of the numbers we are reaching here.
I'm happy we haven't been the first playground for most of you. As the vast majority of our users, when I decided to learn how to push some wood I typed chess on google and jumped on chess.com.
It sounded good to me and I ended up playing my first 300/400 games there.
I'm glad I'm the kind of person that constantly seeks for improvement. That will made me look for a better alternative and eventually find this site.
Other sites have been around for much longer than we did, and people are very cautious about one particular thing: CHANGE.
People don't change, unless they really feel they can get some huge profit in doing so.
All of the people here didn't just happen to join lichess, they were players of many other sites who decided to give us a chance and eventually fell in love not only with the site features, but with the idea behind lichess. Namely, behind the "li" in lichess.
More than 1500 users everyday choose lichess because they are seeking for improvement, and I want to thank all of you who did so.
We are a huge community of people who don't settle with the first thing we could get away with, love the internet and don't want to pollute it with ads and popups stating your plan isn't VIP enough to do what you wanted to do, love chess and the fine coding by our benevolent dictator.
We have a lot to share!
Thanks for reading all of this, peace.