About becoming Commercial. The Onno Case

[fern]

Onno is commercial from the beginning. Nobody knew of this engine before the announcement by his author of its existence and the official birth was at once associated to a commercial claim. No betas, no demos, just put your money where your curiosity is.
I wonder which is the sense of it with so many engines for free and equally or more strong that the rating Onno claims to have.
I did this question to Onno, the author himself. He answered that in fact sounded weird with so many freeware over there, yes, but he has a point: the "seed" issue which I confess I do not understand well what a heck is, but at least seems to be something new. I know also that a partner of him is working in a new, innovative GUI. That is something new, again. So I hope. I am bored to death with current Gui's
Even so, it still seems strange this kind of navigation against the current, but I cannot but feel a sense of admiration for his obstinacy and I would like to support this guy. He believe in his product and so he consider fair to ask money for it. It is not much money anyway, less that the necessary to get a hot meal in NYC.
So becoming or being commercial from the start -not being a big company as Chessbase, I mean- looks like still workable, provided you deliver something even marginally different or better to what is by now the common staple; in that way you are capable of awaken curiosity payable with not much money.
What is more, perhaps just the promise or hope to get that little difference makes the trick. Or perhaps the sheer fact that we must pay for something automatically confer to it extra value and so, in a loop, push us to buy.
Who knows.

Just some idly musings
fern

[F. Bluemers]

Fernando,if you would have taken a peek in chesswar and openwar like you used to,Onno would not have been totally new to you
Best
Fonzy

[fern]

Sure, but that does not change what I have said. Onno, maybe well known in those sites you mention, is not so well known out of them. For the sake of my argument, I still consider it as almost new...

Fern

[Dann Corbit]

Onno is commercial from the beginning. Nobody knew of this engine before the announcement by his author of its existence and the official birth was at once associated to a commercial claim. No betas, no demos, just put your money where your curiosity is.
I wonder which is the sense of it with so many engines for free and equally or more strong that the rating Onno claims to have.
I did this question to Onno, the author himself. He answered that in fact sounded weird with so many freeware over there, yes, but he has a point: the "seed" issue which I confess I do not understand well what a heck is, but at least seems to be something new. I know also that a partner of him is working in a new, innovative GUI. That is something new, again. So I hope. I am bored to death with current Gui's
Even so, it still seems strange this kind of navigation against the current, but I cannot but feel a sense of admiration for his obstinacy and I would like to support this guy. He believe in his product and so he consider fair to ask money for it. It is not much money anyway, less that the necessary to get a hot meal in NYC.
So becoming or being commercial from the start -not being a big company as Chessbase, I mean- looks like still workable, provided you deliver something even marginally different or better to what is by now the common staple; in that way you are capable of awaken curiosity payable with not much money.
What is more, perhaps just the promise or hope to get that little difference makes the trick. Or perhaps the sheer fact that we must pay for something automatically confer to it extra value and so, in a loop, push us to buy.
Who knows.

Just some idly musings
fern

Lots of commercial engines came out of the blue.
In fact, I would guess most of them did.

The engine in ChessMaster is clearly not the strongest engine and yet it makes more money than all the others put together (I am guessing but it is a good guess because it has multiple millions of sales and none of the others will approach that).

Any engine can become commercial, and you don't even have to be a particularly strong engine to do it. I guess that very few engine authors make a lot of money doing chess programming. Or (put another way) the considerable talents required to create and maintain a solid chess engine (commercial engines clearly can't crash, eat all your memory or other evil things) will return more dollars if put to almost any other for-profit programming task.

IOW, if you spend 1000 hours writing a customized accounting program in COBOL, then the program will be worth at least $100,000 and that is what you should expect to be paid for it. I guess that writing a good {commercial grade} chess engine will take a thousand hours or better and also that the programmer is paid a lot less than $100,000 for his efforts.

Getting Rybka (OR Chess Tiger OR Shredder OR Junior OR ...) for less than $1000 is an incredible bargain and is possible only because the costs are amortized and also because the programmers that write these programs want to do it for non-money reasons (they can clearly make more money doing something else).

[Ryan Benitez]

IOW, if you spend 1000 hours writing a customized accounting program in COBOL, then the program will be worth at least $100,000 and that is what you should expect to be paid for it.

80-120k per year is typical for such work. Maybe as a contractor it is higher reward along with the higher risk.

I guess that writing a good {commercial grade} chess engine will take a thousand hours or better and also that the programmer is paid a lot less than $100,000 for his efforts.

For someone who has experience with board games already and has written a similar program I'll go with 2 months to write the basic engine. This would not be commercial ready though and a lot of testing is needed to make an engine strong and that part eats time.

Getting Rybka (OR Chess Tiger OR Shredder OR Junior OR ...) for less than $1000 is an incredible bargain and is possible only because the costs are amortized and also because the programmers that write these programs want to do it for non-money reasons (they can clearly make more money doing something else).

I am sure most of the programmers have full time jobs and do computer chess as a hobby.

[Dann Corbit]

IOW, if you spend 1000 hours writing a customized accounting program in COBOL, then the program will be worth at least $100,000 and that is what you should expect to be paid for it.

80-120k per year is typical for such work. Maybe as a contractor it is higher reward along with the higher risk.

I guess that writing a good {commercial grade} chess engine will take a thousand hours or better and also that the programmer is paid a lot less than $100,000 for his efforts.

For someone who has experience with board games already and has written a similar program I'll go with 2 months to write the basic engine. This would not be commercial ready though and a lot of testing is needed to make an engine strong and that part eats time.

Besides testing, it will require documentation. 80% of the cost of sofware is maintenance and that is where the real rub is going to reside.
I guess that in 40 hours a decent programmer can write a program that makes legal chess moves but nobody would pay for that.

I strongly suspect (for instance) that all of the following have more than 1000 hours in them:
Chess Genius
Chessmaster
Chess Tiger
Fritz
Fruit
Gandalf
HIARCS
Junior
The King
Ktulu
Loop
Naum
Rebel
Ruffian 2
Rybka
Shredder
SmarThink
Deep Sjeng
Smarthink
Zappa

But then again, I guess that many of the free engines have more than 1000 hours in them also.
Which reminds me of the Mint author's admonition, who said {me paraphrasing}:
Choose life! Don't write chess programs.

Getting Rybka (OR Chess Tiger OR Shredder OR Junior OR ...) for less than $1000 is an incredible bargain and is possible only because the costs are amortized and also because the programmers that write these programs want to do it for non-money reasons (they can clearly make more money doing something else).

I am sure most of the programmers have full time jobs and do computer chess as a hobby.

[Sylwy]

The engine in ChessMaster is clearly not the strongest engine and yet it makes more money than all the others put together

WChess & The King ( the engines behind Chessmaster series ) were "the victims " of GUI features & tutorials . In most cases the customers of this series even doesn't know what is a chess engine , or what is a WB/UCI/CB protocol.Simply they like Chessmaster for all features !
Onno chess engine is know by some fanatics of computer chess.But never - single the chess engine- can compete against Lego Chess or Aladdin Chess - to say ! Be sure !
100 customers for Onno chess engine is an optimistic evaluation !

Regards,
Silvian

PS: And.........we never know the revenues of Johan de Koning from UbiSoft sales !

[mclane]

but maybe, if onno gets stronger, it can get more customers.

[PauloSoare]

I'm trying to understand why I bought Onno. The engine Only works with a single processor, I don´t know what is the maximum HT supported and it does not work with endgames tablebases.
Furthermore, I liked the way the author presented the program here, and I made a bet on an engine from Germany.