We need a lichess.org of Go.
Actually, thibault himself called OGS the Lichess of Go, but I’d still love to see a good server that’s more fully open source, like Lichess.
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I won’t disagree but maybe that’s because we miss enough people to run a project like this, and furthermore to keep it working and evolving. Still possible if we could have some CJK people interested in it?
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Aren’t we really just saying we need OGS to have a more active live playing scene, with more Dan level players? Can’t we just figure out a way to do that by making OGS the backend for a few other live servers? The KGS merger should help with this, but my concern is that if it seems dead, people will flee to places like fox where they know they can get live games.
I have gradually become more and more of a correspondence tournament player over my time on OGS. That is partly because of time commitments and wanting more serious games against stronger opponents, but part of that is because the live match and live tournament features have just died so much you can’t even get a game going quickly enough to use the feature even when you want to. This seems like a marketing issue, not a ‘features’ issue…
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It is an understandable way of presenting a sales pitch for their target audience of choice.
If you wanted to sell bubble-gum to proviolinists, you’d call your brand “the Stradivarious of bubble-gums”… that’s what they understand as “top-quality”, that’s what you pitch them, even if it doesn’t make much sense.
They could have said that they want to make “the Rolex or servers” or “the Buggati Veyron of board games” or “the Netflix of Go lessons” depending the audience that they’d want to present their pitch.
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That would be major stepping stone, yes.
There’s no easy way to achieve that though. Even the “KGS merger” is just an idea on a forum, not anything actually ongoing.
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Copying my post from reddit –
When I see on their roadmap OGS integration, then their own private servers, I have the same suspicion with GoMagic as I have whenever I see Microsoft get involved in a Linux or Open Source project. The “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” approach
My biggest worry is that GoMagic starts by doing multiplayer as a client for OGS, then gets big and becomes the chess.com of Go. At that point, a large portion of OGS players are really doing it through GoMagic, at which point GoMagic switches to their own proprietary servers. All the GoMagic players will be taken off OGS and so OGS will have taken a huge playerbase hit (potentially getting non GoMagic OGS players to move to proprietary GoMagic to find matches), and GoMagic users are on the GoMagic servers where they can start to do more things to charge fees and extract value. I worry about something that tries to change the pillar of the Western Go community from something open source to something proprietary and controlled by a single company
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I think it’s worth noting that Microsoft never succeeded in killing Linux. I don’t see GoMagic supplanting OGS either (though I agree it would be a shame if the did end up fracturing the community as you described)
I mean this is basically OGS too. There is really only one person in control of OGS. Sure, one could repurpose the web client code, but no one has done it since it is useless without the (closed source) server.
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I have the same concern. However, if Go Magic is able to help popularise Go more then we’re not talking about a fixed pie. Lichess still exists and it’s doing fairly well. I’d imagine a significant portion of the Lichess user base is aware of chess.com but they continue to use lichess. As long as OGS has something different and enticing enough to offer compared to Go Magic then, instead of its player base migrating there, OGS might benefit from the growth of the western player base, if such growth does happen.
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I’ll resist going into the culture / demography differences. But one angle that I feel I should comment on is the UI difference (or is it UX these days?) between chesscom and lichess. I find the chesscom UI absolutely horrible and that is why I prefer to play on lichess. chesscom is like youtube, trying to grab my attention By Any Means Necessary even if it harms the play quality, which in my case it definitely does. I think OGS is much more like lichess that way, and should stay so.
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Do we need a chesscom for Go? Probably not. Should we want one? Probably, if you want the western go community to grow.
Growing a community, or anything really, requires investment. In the case of chesscom that means stuff like:
- Creating courses and other learning tools
- Organizing online and IRL tournaments with decent-sized prize funds
- Hiring commentators for major events
- UI design and high-traffic backend tech
- Marketing for products / events / players
I can’t speak for Europe, but very little of this kind of investment happens for US go! There are zero online go tournaments with prize funds, and prize funds for IRL tournaments are usually by donation / external sponsorship; there are close to zero (maybe actually zero?) paid commentator gigs; no online go site outside of Asia has full-time engineering / product design staff; and I don’t think there is such a thing as a marketing budget in go. There is a reasonable amount of educational content on youtube, but the only courses on par with chesscom / chessable / chessly that I’m aware of are provided by gomagic.
Obviously we should not expect the amount of investment in go to rival what we’re seeing in chess any time soon, but with ZERO investment the community is at risk of stagnation and decline. I’m not a gomagic customer, but the free content that I’ve seen is pretty good, so I’m glad to see they’re trying to scale up their operations.
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Let’s imagine your nightmare comes to pass and gomagic transforms OGS into the chesscom of go. Here’s what that would look like:
- Playing games and int tournaments would be free
- Stripped-down AI review would be free
- Basic UI customization would be free
- Some courses / training tools would be free
- Full AI review would be paid
- Puzzles would be paid
- Full set of courses / training tools would be paid
- Player / move insights would be paid
Notice that all of the free stuff is already free on OGS. Also notice that with the exception of full AI review, none of chesscom’s paid tier perks exist on OGS. So… what are we actually worried about here?
Eventually all these threads (we have a couple annually) converge to this main issue, that there are no funds/money/investments to be had, so that a cycle of expansion can begin and then be sustainable.
It will probably just go on as it does now, especially in smaller/emergent markets, where the result will depend on whether there will be people with the will, vision, time and money to expand the game within their country. Wherever/whenever those people fail, Go eventually withers. Whenever they are successful and a critical mass of players is exceeded, then Go usually maintains its presence in the long term.
For one thing, running ads, and excessive ads, so “free players” would have an incentive to transition to paid customers. You know, the business model of chess com freemium.
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How would they run excessive ads? They won’t run it during games, wont they? 
“Watch this 30 second ad to unlock your next 10 moves”
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The website would be ‘Pay to Win’ since its so distracting.
My first reaction was going to be “but there aren’t even any ads in chesscom free tier”. I checked and it turns out they do run a banner ad on the right of the screen, so fair enough. But I used to play a lot on chesscom and never consciously noticed that the ads even exist - you don’t have to click through them, you don’t have to scroll past them, they don’t block the screen, etc.
I guess the question is this: if OGS started running unintrusive banner ads and used the revenue to create marketing and learning tools that grew the player base, how would you evaluate that trade? For me it would be a big positive, but to each their own.
The difference with this thread is that it’s about a company that is trying to initiate the virtuous cycle by actually raising money to grow the game. IMO we should meet this with support and excitement, not cynicism.
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I would be very much pissed of and even might try KGS again.
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If there is something I strongly enjoy with OGS, it’s to not have ads. Thank you anoek for this financial choice
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