A sufferer of its personal success

It doesn’t get far more traditional than chess. I imply, it was invented again within the fifteenth century, finest we are able to inform, and it’s nonetheless one of the vital well-liked video games performed world wide at this time. Nothing highlights this sentiment greater than the truth that Chess.com, the foremost on-line chess platform which you could play proper in your browser, is crashing just because it has gotten so well-liked, the servers can’t deal with all the site visitors anymore. Initially noticed by PC Gamer, Chess.com posted an official assertion to their weblog yesterday letting us on in why these points are occurring, and why the sport has gotten so well-liked within the first place.

On December 31, 2022, the positioning had seven million energetic members for the primary time, which was eclipsed by a report of 10 million energetic members on January 20, 2023. The Chess.com app has reached the #2 spot within the free video games class on the iOS retailer, and greater than 250,000 new accounts are created on the positioning day-after-day. 31,700,000 video games have been performed on January 20, which set a brand new website report for video games performed in a single day, and Chess.com says that they “at the moment are often seeing multiple million video games an hour.”

So the place’s all this buzz coming from? In 2020 and 2021, the uptick in customers may simply be credited to lockdowns, streamers who have been taking part in the sport, and the discharge of Netflix’s well-liked sequence about chess, The Queen’s Gambit. Now, Chess.com says many of the buzz is coming from extra widespread information protection, from celebrities voicing their newfound chess obsessions to the rise of chessboxing, a sport that mixes alternating rounds of chess and boxing, which ends in both a checkmate or a knockout.

As for the server points, it appears that evidently when the positioning was initially created, it merely wasn’t constructed to face up to such large numbers. Chess.com says they’re trying to get “extra/higher {hardware} each on-site and within the cloud,” and that “some main modifications shall be in place in 2-3 weeks that we hope will enable us to correctly deal with the subsequent wave of chess enthusiasm.” Take a look at the full weblog should you’re fascinated with diving into some extra of the small print.

After all it sucks to have the positioning crashing on us, however I feel it’s actually cool that chess is getting a lot love within the period of recent gaming. It appears like with each passing 12 months, titles turn into increasingly advanced with so many various gameplay nuances and shifting items — chess’ ongoing recognition for hundreds of years after it was created solely speaks to the power and endurance of easy, elegant sport design.