2 ms·
Chessbase is one of those pieces of software that would be completely eaten by a cheaper alternative if the market was bigger. $400+ for a single download, sell
by janalsncm 2y ago
Chessbase is one of those pieces of software that would be completely eaten by a cheaper alternative if the market was bigger. $400+ for a single download, selling mostly open source data, and it looks like it was made in 1998.
The thing is, there is money in chess but not that much money. There will never be a unicorn in chess software.
- Scarblac 2y agoScid exists of course, I've used it since forever and it works fine. But you have to find your own games to fill it with (probably from The Week In Chess) and it looks like Linux did in 1998. Most of my opening stuff is just in a bunch of Lichess studies these days though.
- dmurray 2y agoOpen source may have eaten the other end of the market. Lichess is good: not as feature rich as Chessbase and a less complete database, last time I checked, but less buggy and faster for some purposes. It's hard to imagine a competitor at say $50 that did say 80% of Chessbase's functionality would sell many copies. It needs to be 150% of Chessbase and cost $200. Scid (and forks) also exists in the open source world. It works just fine but the UX is lacking; I've never met a serious player who relied on it. It's the GIMP to Chessbase's Photoshop. So the UI needs to be great or to be a clone of Chessbase's. There's also Chessbase mobile which was an amazing product when it first came out. It has the three features people really want from Chessbase: search for a position, search for a player's games, run engine analysis. All in the cloud. For something like $6.99. Sadly Chessbase seem to underprovision servers for it and Android nerfed it by preventing you plugging in strong OS engines. But it's a sign they can give away the product if they need to get into a price war.