I used to play a lot of Words with Friends (which also had a Chess with Friends)
Business model was Ads or Pay a few dollars for the app. And i think you could buy hints or power-ups too, but i think that would be terrible 
The size of the screen maybe?
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My take-aways from the pitch deck:
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I expected to see a strategy for breaking through and unifying the different nations / cultures. What GoMagic wants to add on top of OGS is: lessons, content, UI and community vibe. These are highly culture and language specific, but in their path forward they only put “Chinese and Korean localisation”. I believe localisation alone is not enough, and, is leaving out Japanese localisation in the roadmap an oversight?
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Conflicting strategy. GoMagic themselves expect 60.000 Western users and 450.000 Asian, making the population for 88% Asian. However, the opportunity is “Making go attractive to new audiences, especially in the west.” This seems at odds with the whole 88% Asia target. And from an investment point of view it doesn’t really make sense to target the little west unless you have an expectation that a larger new customer group will be created.
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Revenue-wise they aim for 2,5% conversion in the west, but I think this is high. Looking at chess.com numbers, theirs is 0,75% (1,5M paying customers vs 200M registered users) or 0,37% (vs 400M estimated casuals worldwide). GoMagic estimate 0,2% for China which I also think is high considering the existing competition. The comparison with Chess.com is ambitious because Chess.com was already a big name 10 years ago
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They are looking for an angel investor, however €6 mil as an upper market limit is not that high. Let’s say they can expect to realistically achieve 25% in 5 years, so €1,5M/yr revenue. An investor typically aims for a 10x return. If they need to pay back the loan after 6 years, they may have €4M revenue on the bank, assuming no expenses. That means the Angel investment at most will be €400k. Is that enough to fuel a 5-10 man team + additional expertise for 5 years? Not saying it isn’t but just some back-of-paper numbers.
None the less, these are all things that can be improved upon if need be and I like the ambition and stated goals. So good luck!
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I’m still confused about what the actual fear is here. Tsumego Dragon is a competing go education site that actually does have loot boxes. Has that damaged go culture? Have the users of Tsumego Dragon been harmed somehow? Should we be suspicious that Clossius is secretly planning to add betting so that he can get kids hooked on gambling with cute dragons?
I consider a worry to be “valid” if there is affirmative evidence that some risk or harm may come to pass. It’s not enough to say “gomagic hasn’t proved that they DON’T intend to create a gambling site!”
Fair enough - this means that we have to interpret the sentiment numbers in conjunction with a qualitative analysis of the arguments being made. If the kinds of objections were things like “the numbers on slide 9 don’t look very promising”, then maybe it would be possible to say that the community is more supportive than it appears due to all of the constructive feedback. But so far you are the only participant in this thread who has framed their arguments in terms of what gomagic has actually proposed or their history / existing products. So I stand by the numbers.
Hard disagree, at least in the context of this pitch. What they actually wrote was: “The goal: become the #1 Platform for Playing and Learning Go, in other words Become Chesscom in the World of Go”. If I say “Bill Gates is my idol”, then sure, I have raised some troubling questions about whether my values truly align with Gates’. If I say “I want to be as successful in business as Bill Gates”, then it does not imply that I wish to replicate his business tactics or associate with notorious sex traffickers.
I highly, highly doubt they are going to be able to raise money from a traditional investor - the total addressable market is too small to even get a meeting. I think it will either have to be another game-oriented company looking to expand into go (chesscom itself would be a good candidate, which I’m sure would go over fantastically well…) or someone rich who wants to support go. In either case the fact that they have managed to generate any profit at all is impressive.
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I truly did not intend to call out you or any of the other people that I quoted. Somebody else claimed that I was “creating a fictitious subtext that doesn’t actually exist”, so I needed receipts. I respect that your full opinion is more nuanced than the one argument that I quoted - I just needed to show that the kind of argument I was responding to actually exists.
“Crazy” is way too strong, but… weird? It wasn’t just mentioned - it was a sustained enough topic of conversation that I went through the pitch deck again and scoured the gomagic website trying to figure out what people were even talking about. It turns out it was just some strange free-association, or something.
Look, a moderator of this forum told me twice that I was fabricating the level of negativity in this thread. The first time I cited specific examples; the second time I wasn’t sure what else to do!
Sorry, but I’m still confused about your overarching concern. They didn’t say anything about ads in their pitch deck, and I don’t see any ads in their free-tier site now (I just logged in to check). I think your argument is that ads don’t work: other go sites don’t use them, and they killed yahoo go. Granting that argument, are you saying “I’m worried that gomagic will acquire business partners that force them to run ads for free tier and then they will fail”? Isn’t that maybe a little premature?
There are always overlaps, and functionality alone doesn’t always make a good category (it depends on the purpose of using it). Like Badukpop, or other lesser-known apps I listed above, they all have Go server functions, and there are even more mobile apps that are just UI that can connect to other Go servers. And then there are apps that just allow you to play with another friend of your choice, but not as a server, but more traditional play-by-mail type, through other communication channels. So what point should we include all services that allow players to play across the Internet as Go servers, even if they don’t have a ranking system? What about an app that has that function, but rarely anybody actually plays with others, but uses it as a tsumego tool? Hence, why I said previously, we might need some sub-categories for different purposes. And a service and an app like GoQuest can belong to more than just one category.
I am speaking more of a historian, than anything looking forward, and saw many had attempted in the past using such strategy and others existing services from other mobile games, or online games use it. But this strategy seems to failed again and again in history and move on to other model. So take away from the history lesson what you want, it doesn’t apply to future planning or they neve has the intention to do it or not we have no idea.
Just a warning if you will.
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My guess is that they will struggle to get traction with standard investors - the addressable market is just too small. I think they’ll have more luck with an organization like chesscom itself, or maybe by looking for a wealthy patron who is primarily interested in supporting go.
To your list of points, I would add that would have liked to see some discussion about their target user personas. Are they going after existing go players, or are they going to market to people who don’t know much about the game? Are they targeting beginners because there’s more of them, or experienced players because maybe they’re more likely to spend money on go? I guess you don’t need a full strategic roadmap for a deck like that, but that’s what I would ask about if I were considering an investment!
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What’s wrong with this site? If you want something else, I have a similar site for chess that fits Lego. I’ll send it. XVI Torneo de Entrenamiento Blitz Arena #IG8U5s8x • playstrategy.org
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As a chess player who later picked up Go (and loves it), my impression (please correct me if I am wrong) is that Go organisation is fragmented and hard to understand.
There is a ranking system (kyu, dan and p) but it has no international standard. How strong a 5 kyu player is depends on which country (specifically, national federation) they are from.
There is no World Go Championship. Technically, there is, but none of the participants are among the strongest payers in the world.
International centralisation (or at least greater international coordination) has to start at the federation level, not just online.
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We do have tournaments worthy of being called the World Championship, and the players are usually the top-class players. It’s just not in the same format as that for chess.
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We need to turn OGS as big as chess.com ^____^
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There are tournaments claiming each to be the world go championship. At the same time they claim to be noodles or Fujitsu or whatever. Nevermind the sponsorship offers big prize money and so best players are taking participation.
Only problem is that no one is proclaimed as the world champion. Well not really my problem, it’s more a nice feature for me because it brings a lot of passionate debates between amateurs.
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Welcome to go!
Yes, this is pretty much correct. There actually is an international governing body called IGF (international go federation), but it doesn’t maintain a rating system or run professional tournaments. That is handled primarily by national / regional go federations.
In particular, there is no counterpart of the candidates tournament or world championship match, which is kind of unfortunate. Instead there are essentially four top level tournaments: Ing Cup, Samsung Cup, LG Cup, and MLily Cup. There are other big international tournaments, but these are the individual events with the largest prize funds. The situation gets more complicated if you go back in time - for much of the 20th century Japan was extremely dominant in go, and the peak of go prestige consisted of 7 Japanese title matches with a candidates-like qualification system.
Anyway, yes, it would be nice if there were some centralization / standardization for OTB go. But chesscom’s success in growing the chess community has rivaled or exceeded FIDE’s in recent years, and I’m kind of hoping we’ll see something similar in go. The AGA / NAGF seem to have similar problems as FIDE - out of touch, afraid of the internet, more interested in keeping the existing establishment happy than growing the game.
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I disagree with this characterization of the AGA. The AGA created and supports the North American professional Go scene, as well as the go associations of Canada and Mexico and throughout Latin America. There are some entrenched leaders who are resistant to change. But that is true in any community, Go or otherwise. We are extremely active on Discord and looking toward the future of Go digitally and in person.
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I’d say any tournament that has regional preliminary or regional representatives (not limited to CJKT regions) would count for international tournaments. So besides the 4 you mentioned, Chunlan, Lanke, Beihai Xinyi, and Nanyang Cup also count (the last three are newer tournaments). And it is the consensus when we are talking about world champion titles.
However, we sometimes also include those that only include CJKT pros tournaments, like Kuksu Mountains, Supreme Player, and Asian Games Go personal competition
What actually counts is actually pretty important for pros, since in CJKT pro associations, a world championship can grant them 9p rank directly. (or 8p, for finalists, etc.)
And there were discussions about world major title tally in the past
The thing is that a very small portion of Go players are outside East Asia. The amateur Taiwanese Go players that had registered to participate in local tournaments already in the hundreds of thousands range, and a big portion of them have diplomas issued by one of the amateur associations, not counting those who don’t participate in tournaments. And Taiwan has the smallest Go communities in CJKT (others in CJK count in millions), but already outnumbered EGF and NAGF combined. And almost no players outside of CJKT regions reach the same level as professional players in CJKT pro associations. Effectively making East Asia tournaments the same as world tournaments for the strongest players.
Also, all CJKT associations have promotion budgets for players outside of East Asia, and many Go schools are trying to go international as well. But there is an inherent issue with the Go rules (the same exact game record can have different winners, under different rules), and somewhat historically, issues between CJKT regions. Hence, the major players cannot agree, and the forces elsewhere are just way too weak.
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OTB go is completely centralized through the IGF and its regional branches. I never heard of other go federation pretending of a world couverture.
IGF is focused on the amateur world, but branches like EGF and AGA did put in place professional systems.
I’d be interested of more information about the interconnections between the various professional associations and the IGF and its branches.
It’s easy to criticize the work of the AGA EGF and such… You know for most OTB players, their commitment in developing go is very simple: pay an annual fee so they can participate in the tournaments. And that’s all.
So like @Plum_Talk said there are things made that you can’t just discard in a blick of the eye. I know not so well for AGA, better for EGF. I stay long time in China without knowing much about the organization either.
But wherever I was even if I had the feeling that those organization were not doing enough for promotion or for my pleasure, I still tried to not be so straight criticizing because that involved benevolent friends who put a lot of their time and energy into the development of the go population and because that wasn’t the way to make things better IMHO.
If you want to criticize you better come with some more nuanced description of the situation, listing what is made and what could be done, and how things are now.
Back on a “chess.com” for go, it looks like a pure fantasy from a westerner not taking in account that till now most is happening between C J and K. Those 3 countries have each their own professional system, their sponsors, their schools, their websites and their history. That’s a better way to present the situation to a newcomer as to say, man I miss a chess.com of go.
True. Now each federation publish a rating of its professional players and I know 2 unofficial international ratings (one in Japan (? no ref) and the one of R. Coulon)
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Taiwan also has our own professional system, and history going far back in the 17th century (and we actually have stronger players earlier than South Korea or even mainland China, due to the closer relationship of Go players from Taiwan to Japan, like Lin Haifeng), and his name is used for the professional Go association in Taiwan (originally for insei training, and now for pro competition as well)
Yep. Sorry to the Taiwanese Go world. CJKT indeed.