How Chess.com 100x’d Mobile Revenue in 10 Years

Chess.com, which operates the world’s largest online chess platform, has turned a centuries-old board game into one of mobile’s more remarkable growth stories. In 2016, Chess.com’s mobile app averaged ~$56K in monthly revenue. In 2026, that figure has risen to ~$5.9M — roughly 105x its 2016 level.

While it would be easy to attribute this growth to a handful of cultural zeitgeist moments that brought chess into the mainstream, they don’t fully explain how Chess.com converted that momentum into a durable mobile business that is now close to breaking into the global top 100 grossing games list.

We see this exceptional growth story unfolding across three distinct eras:

• 2016–2019: Steady Build — The audience grew steadily while monetization improved.
• 2020–2022: Audience Breakout — A surge in organic interest grew MAUs while retention improved.
• 2023–Present: Scale Compounds — MAU growth and rising ARPDAU compounded results.

This article breaks down those three eras to identify what growth initiatives and cultural moments may help explain Chess.com mobile’s underlying growth story. In doing so, and with the help of insights from Erik Allebest (CEO of Chess.com), we explore how Chess.com first built its mobile foundation, converted a global chess boom into a durable audience, and then began turning up monetization — all this while seeing >90% organic install volume.

Data caveat: This analysis uses Sensor Tower estimates for mobile IAP revenue and excludes China Android, advertising, and DTC revenue.

Let’s jump in.

Pre-2020: Steady Build

During this period, annual mobile IAP revenue rose from ~$0.7M in 2016 to ~$3.2M in 2019 – a +$2.5M or +373% jump. Approximately 37% of this growth was driven by rising MAUs, which almost doubled from ~1.6M to ~3.1M (+1.5M, +94%). Higher ARPDAU drove the remaining ~63%, growing from $0.003 to $0.008 (+155%). In other words,Chess.com’s pre-2020 revenue expansion was driven by a steady influx of new users, who retained well and monetized more efficiently.

What’s particularly interesting to note is that Chess.com saw this growth occur during a time of flat-to-declining global interest in chess. This underscores the value of Chess.com’s efforts during this era to overcome this cultural headwind and set the experience up for major success over the next two eras.

The platform’s growth engine during and before the Steady Build era centered around four key factors – investing in product and localization improvements, making the most of external momentum driven by major real-world tournaments, doubling down on Chess.com events and connected coverage, and focusing on creators and related distribution advantages.

Driver #1: Product and Localization Improvements

The various initiatives under this driver performed three main jobs for Chess.com’s mobile business – widening the app’s global accessibility through localization, bringing the broader and proven Chess.com experience onto mobile, and creating highly monetizable engagement loops. In our opinion, these improvements helped build the app’s initial retention and monetization foundation, while better positioning it to capture the audience and revenue upside generated by the other growth drivers that followed in this era.

While going into every item above is out of this article’s scope, here is how they came together to deliver on the three points mentioned above:

• Widening the app’s global accessibility through localization: A January 2013 iOS relaunch introduced 20 languages, followed by a community-powered translation program that expanded mobile support to 70 languages in 2014. Later, editorial (News and Articles) and training (Drills) content was localized into six major languages, with Spanish and Russian Lessons reaching iOS in July 2019. While none of these releases created an obvious download spike, they widened the app’s addressable audience pool and helped retain non-English users – supporting MAU growth over time.
• Bringing the broader and proven Chess.com experience onto mobile: Other critical items the January 2013 iOS relaunch introduced were improved Live Chess connectivity, computer-assisted analysis and social features, and in-app subscription purchases. The 2015 iOS overhaul and later releases brought guided Lessons, editorial content, position-based Drills, board-recognition training through Vision, Live Tournaments, and greater feature parity on Android. Collectively, these improvements gave users more reasons to return to the app (supporting MAU), while enabling subscription purchase flows and related benefits on mobile (supporting ARPDAU).
• Creating highly monetizable engagement loops: The clearest example was Puzzle Rush, which launched in November 2018 and turned chess training into a repeatable five-minute score chase. This feature quickly went viral in the Chess.com community and by March 2019, subscription-tier-based attempt limits gave both paying and non-paying users a direct reason to upgrade. ARPDAU increased by +58% between the six-month periods before and after Puzzle Rush’s launch. Later in 2019, Chess.com expanded the same loop through structured Lessons, Mastery courses, and richer Puzzles modes. Even though Chess.com’s model is F2P, Erik Allebest describes it rather as “pay to learn and improve.” Interestingly, Chess.com’s own analysis found that rapidly improving users were more likely to review their games and use Puzzle Rush and Lessons. Therefore, these features likely gave users more reasons to return to improve their chess skills (supporting MAU) and to invest in a recurring subscription to further support their improvement journey (supporting ARPDAU).

Driver #2: Momentum from Real-World Tournaments

Major global chess tournaments created recurring demand shocks for Chess.com mobile, especially when casual fans could rally around certain chess-related zeitgeist moments like a world championship title, a Magnus Carlsen rivalry, or a year-end speed-chess crown. However, these moments not only brought new users into the app, but also drove ARPDAU increases.

This audience growth pattern was already visible before 2016, during the 2013 Carlsen–Anand World Championship, which Chess.com supported with live coverage, on-site reporting, and a postgame show. Monthly downloads more than doubled month-over-month that November. Viswanathan Anand’s Candidates victory in March 2014 coincided with a +30% MoM downloads increase, while the Carlsen–Anand rematch in November 2014 lifted downloads by +16% MoM. The pattern returned during the 2018 Carlsen–Caruana match, when Chess.com’s multilingual Twitch coverage crossed 100K concurrent viewers as downloads rose +20% MoM in November 2018.

Late 2016 provided the clearest monetization signal. The Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship attracted more than 10M viewers to the official site (90% on smartphones) followed by the World Rapid & Blitz Championship. In December, downloads rose +30%, MAU +6%, and ARPDAU +31% MoM. Similar metric patterns were seen during the 2017, 2018, and 2019 World Rapid & Blitz Championships.

One plausible explanation for both user volume and monetization metrics to increase as described above is that these major real-world tournaments inspired viewers to begin playing or return to chess (becoming Chess.com mobile MAUs by downloading or reopening the app), after which some subscribed to the app’s premium learning and improvement tools (driving up ARPDAU). Even though not every major tournament produced a visible metric lift, they created recurring acquisition and monetization opportunities – and Chess.com mobile’s product experience, subscription proposition, and distribution dexterity determined how much value it captured.

Driver #3: Chess.com Events and Media Coverage

While major real-world tournaments created demand spikes, Chess.com also built its own events and media coverage engine to sustain interest between them. Owned competitions, recurring broadcasts, and editorial coverage gave existing users more reasons to return while creating new entry points for fresh downloads.

While early formats, such as Death Match and Titled Tuesday, established a regular programming cadence, the PRO Chess League and Speed Chess Championship turned that playbook into larger, season-long properties. Simultaneously, the ChessVibes acquisition strengthened Chess.com’s elite-tournament newsroom, while ChessBomb and Chess.com/events created a more complete destination for live event coverage.

The metric response is seen through a few key examples. The Carlsen–Nakamura Blitz Battle in October 2016 attracted more than 183K unique viewers as downloads rose +12% MoM. The October 2019 FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss later coincided with a +16% MoM download increase. As with the major real-world tournaments, not every owned Chess.com event produced major uplifts. But together, they gave Chess.com’s mobile experience more opportunities to acquire users between major tournaments and a stronger destination to keep them engaged.

Driver #4: Creator Partnerships Extended Distribution

Beyond these initiatives, Chess.com also began evolving its creator ecosystem and streaming strategy to function as an auxiliary distribution engine.

This began in August 2015, when it launched regular Twitch programming through #ChessMonday and brought big chess streamers, such as Chessbrahs, onto Chess.com/TV. The first Streamers Challenge followed a month later, with 25 streamers playing a seven-round blitz tournament on Chess.com while broadcasting and discussing their games to their respective audiences.

Chess.com went on to formalize the model through its 2017 Twitch partnership — a multi-year agreement with Twitch providing content and marketing support to grow Chess.com’s online chess audience and business. This resulted in activities such as hosting Magnus Carlsen’s speed chess games, and tying cash prizes and leaderboard points to streaming through revamped streamer-only championships.

By early 2019, Chess.com was working with close to 100 streamer partners, before an April 2019 64-creator man-vs.-machine Twitch Rivals activation extended reach beyond core chess audiences with an esports positioning.

Even though none of these milestones produced a clean, repeatable mobile audience lift, it is likely that Chess.com’s investments in the creator ecosystem acted as an auxiliary distribution and repeat-engagement channel. The potential impact may have been keeping Chess.com visible to its target audiences between larger acquisition moments, and building an audience network that became far more valuable during the app’s Audience Breakout era.

During this period, annual mobile IAP revenue rose from ~$3.2M in 2019 to ~$20.1M in 2022 – a +$16.9M or +530% jump. All the growth was driven by MAU increases, where existing user activity contributed the most. Beyond this also being an era where global interest in chess was rising (as showcased in the previous Google Trends data), Chess.com mobile simply didn’t have a leaky retention bucket, as can be seen below in how MAUs consistently grow while downloads fluctuate. In other words, during Chess.com mobile’s Audience Breakout era, the active user base expanded so quickly that revenue grew more than six-fold, even though average engagement and monetisation metrics were relatively flat versus the previous era’s.

Three drivers help explain the Audience Breakout era. First, Chess.com was in the right place at the right time when COVID-19, The Queen’s Gambit, and the Messi–Ronaldo Louis Vuitton campaign pushed chess into the mainstream. Second, it expanded its events and creator strategy into new non-core chess communities and regional markets. And third, further product improvements helped retain and monetise the users flowing in.

Driver #1: Capitalising on Black Swan Moments

Chess.com was in the right place at the right time for three unlikely cultural moments that dramatically expanded chess’s audience globally. Crucially, the mobile product and distribution engine built beforehand gave Chess.com mobile the foundation to capture value from these surges rather than simply observe them.

Chess.com’s March 2020 review noted record cross-platform usage as COVID-19 lockdowns made online chess play newly relevant. Between February and June 2020, downloads rose +64%, MAU +20%, ARPDAU +45%, and revenue +81%, sequentially.

The larger shock followed in October 2020 with the debut of hit Netflix show, The Queen’s Gambit. Erik Allebest’s account of The Queen’s Gambit boom makes clear that the company had never seen growth at that scale. Between October 2020 and January 2021, downloads grew +362%, MAUs +152%, ARPDAU +134%, and revenue was a whopping +441%. Even though the initial frenzy cooled down between January and March 2021, with downloads falling -19%, the app’s downloads baseline was permanently lifted. Further, MAU rose +15% period-over-period – an early sign that Chess.com mobile provided an excellent retention foundation for the massive top-of-the-funnel expansion.

Finally, in late 2022, the viral Messi–Ronaldo Louis Vuitton campaign placed chess inside the global conversation ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The scale of this post’s virality was extraordinary, and here are some numbers to underscore just how far beyond the core chess audience the image travelled – Ronaldo’s and Messi’s Instagram uploads drew more than 54.5M combined likes within 24 hours, while Ronaldo’s version later reached roughly 42M likes, briefly making it Instagram’s most-liked post by an athlete.

For Chess.com mobile, November to December 2022 downloads rose +61%, MAU +20%, ARPDAU +11%, and revenue +39%, period-over-period. What’s interesting to note here though is how the ARPDAU rise was more muted than the one experienced during The Queen’s Gambit period. This is likely because a very casual (and not seriously monetizing) audience was pulled into Chess.com’s mobile experience, given the massive global and rabid followings Messi and Ronaldo have.

Driver #2: An Expanded Events, Creators, and Broadcast Strategy Targeted New Global Audiences

During this era, Chess.com seemed to have deliberately expanded the focus of its previously built events, creator, and broadcast infrastructure to reach beyond traditional chess communities and major regional audiences. Chess.com events created appointment-based login moments, planned collaborations with major streamers positioned the game as highly accessible for new and non-core chess communities, and Chess.com’s owned coverage kept the brand visible between major real-world tournaments. In a nutshell, Chess.com successfully converted an auxiliary Steady Build era growth layer into core global distribution infrastructure during the Audience Breakout era.

During H1 2020, Samay Raina, a leading Indian stand-up comedian, and a wider group of Indian comedians helped open a mass Indian audience to Chess.com by hosting a “Comedians On Board” online chess tournament that was broadcasted on Raina’s YouTube channel and ChessTV. Between February and June 2020, Chess.com’s India downloads more than tripled from 47K to 158K, while MAU rose +42% from 413K to 588K. India was the app’s largest contributor to the app’s downloads and MAU growth over that time period, accounting for ~31% and ~24% of the downloads and MAU growth, respectively, just ahead of the US.

Meanwhile, in April 2020, Hikaru Nakamura’s Chess.com sessions with xQc showed that an elite player could teach inside a mainstream creator’s community. Chess.com quickly packaged that crossover into PogChamps – a creator-led Chess.com tournament in which popular streamers and celebrities trained with leading chess personalities before competing live. xQc participated in the first iteration of this format, lost against MoistCr1TiKaL in just six moves, and ended up creating the most watched video on Chess.com’s YouTube channel – if you’re looking for a good laugh, we’d highly recommend watching this 2-minute video. PogChamps 2 followed in August 2020, before PogChamps 3 shattered Chess.com records with 16M Twitch views in February 2021 (likely due to bringing on MrBeast, Pokimane, and Rainn Wilson aka “Dwight Schrute” from the TV show “The Office”), and PogChamps 4 extended the format later that year.

Further, the 2020 FIDE Online Olympiad brought 163 national teams onto Chess.com, creating more reason for international fans and audiences to not only support their teams on the platform, but also potentially start playing chess on their mobile phones. In March 2021, Dewa Kipas (an Indonesian amateur chess player accused of cheating) played against Indonesian grand master, Irene Sukandar, in an online broadcast that reached 1.25M concurrent viewers in Indonesia, which is about 10 times that of the most-watched live-streamed chess events in history. The engine continued broadening in 2022 through key items like Candidates and Chennai Olympiad coverage, major streamer Ludwig’s chessboxing event (that drew 558K live viewers), and the Carlsen–Nakamura Speed Chess final.

Driver #3: Product Improvements Captured and Retained the Audience

Chess.com entered the Audience Breakout era with a solid mobile foundation, and improved on it in the following ways:

1. In November 2020, a month after The Queen Gambit’s Netflix debut, Chess.com introduced Beth Harmon bots that made the show-driven interest immediately playable in-game.
2. Over Q3 and Q4 2021, the Daily Puzzle added a calendar, streak, and video explanations, while the Players League launch added weekly divisions and deeper progression to regular games. The latter increased games played by +20% in December 2021.
3. During April 2022, v4 of Chess.com’s mobile experience launched. This improved the overall app’s interface design, screen navigation, technical performance, and generally made the app’s core engagement features (Play, Puzzles, and Lessons) much easier to reach.
4. Retention improvements coincided with the abovementioned v4 launch, but continued to improve over the rest of 2022. In the US, average D1 retention increased from ~31% in Q1 2022 to ~37% in Q4. Similarly, D7 retention rose from ~20% to ~24%, D30 from ~14% to ~17%, and ~D90 from 11% to 13%. Needless to say, these are not small movements for an app that was 10 years into its mobile journey.

During this period, annual mobile IAP revenue rose from $20.1M in 2022 to $58.8M in 2025 – a +$38.7M or +193% jump. The first eight months of 2026 then generated another $47.3M, +25% more than the same period in 2025. Approximately 80% of the overall era lift was MAU-driven, while the remaining 20% came from steady ARPDAU growth (sprinkled with spikes). Let’s also not forget that this era was the time that global interest in chess was at its peak, as previously showcased in the Google Trends data.

Even though Q1 2023 was a major downloads influx period, MAU growth over the era was mostly driven by improved retention of existing users. This was likely due to a baseline shift in retention – US D1-7-30 retention improved from 35-22-16% in 2022 to 42-26-19% in 2023, a roughly +18-20% YoY increase across the retention funnel, and stayed there for the rest of the era. Not only does this mean that Chess.com maximized long-term retention of all the new downloads, but also for the first time ever, the app’s MAU trendline healthily detached from its downloads one. Further, ARPDAU steadily rose during the era, averaging 1.23¢ during the first eight months of 2026 versus 1.08¢ during the same period in 2022 – a +14% increase over four years. In short, even though this era began with another new downloads shock, it evolved into a more balanced engine where a larger established audience, an improved retention baseline, and growing ARPDAU all reinforced one another to nearly 3x revenues versus the previous era.

In our view, four forces shaped this era. First, a massive virality wave at the start of 2023 reset Chess.com’s audience baseline thereafter. Then, investing in recurring live-ops challenges and product improvements gave that larger playerbase more reasons to return (and monetize). Next, stronger subscription-only features and sales helped lift the ARPDAU baseline. Finally, Chess.com further expanded its events, creator, and coverage distribution engine to keep refilling the top-of-the-funnel.

Driver #1: A Viral Wave Reset the Audience Baseline

The downloads influx that opened 2023 was already building in Q4 2022, and it was likely a combination of multiple factors:

1. Continued audience growth momentum from:
   1. The viral Messi-Ronaldo chess picture in November 2022.
   2. The Carlsen-Niemann cheating controversy, which erupted in September 2022 and took a global stage.
   3. The well performing Chessboxing streaming event and Speed Chess finals in December 2022.
2. Chess.com’s December 2022 acquisition of the Play Magnus Group, which brought Magnus Carlsen on as an official Chess.com ambassador and regular platform tournament participant, likely drawing more of his fans into Chess.com’s ecosystem.
3. Chessboard gifts and games over the holidays, which likely translated to online chess engagement.
4. Launching “Mittens” in January 2023 – a deceptively strong, trash-talking cat bot whose encounters with streamers became entertainment (and free Chess.com marketing) themselves. Across Chess.com, that month’s cat bots attracted 120 million games.
5. Chess.com trending on app store top games lists, and becoming the top free iOS game in February 2023 and recording more than one billion games in the same month.
6. The return of PRO Chess League and the launch of the 2023 Champions Chess Tour in February 2023.
7. CEO Erik Allebest also points to short-form chess videos helping popularize the game in schools.

The mobile impact was substantial: downloads nearly doubled from 3.8M in December 2022 to 7.3M in January 2023, MAU grew +33% to 29.6M, and revenue rose +52%. More importantly, MAUs did not disappear as the viral downloads wave faded. In fact, MAUs remained far above its prior baseline, which also proved to be a key reset on which the rest of the era compounded.

Driver #2: Recurring Live-ops Challenges Gave a Larger Playerbase More Reasons to Return

Having successfully attracted and retained a much larger audience, Chess.com started focussing on levelling up its live-ops events cadence. A key aspect was its Seasonal Bot releases, which were limited-time, themed AI opponents designed to give players a reason to return and tackle fresh challenges before each rotation ended.

While these started to take shape during the Audience Breakout era (2-5 occasional releases annually), they became a regular monthly live-ops program by 2023. We identified at least 12 seasonal bot mobile events between 2023 and 2025, plus 10 during the first eight months of 2026. Chess.com reported 120 million games against January 2023’s cat bots, and later described monthly bots as one of its most popular features.

The events themselves also became more involved. October 2023’s Halloween bots changed every Monday, while March 2024’s murder mystery encouraged players to return for new clues and dialogue. In 2026, monthly challenges went further with repeat-play points that unlocked permanent boards, pieces, and profile decorations. The opportunity was no longer just to beat a new opponent, but to follow a story or work toward a reward before the month ended.

Beyond this, Chess.com mobile also released various product improvements over this era that likely made the daily mobile experience a bit more enjoyable to return to. In particular, February 2026’s mobile widgets brought play shortcuts and streak reminders onto the phone’s home screen, and Chess.com reported roughly 90% next-day return among users starting sessions through widgets.

Driver #3: Premium Product and Promotions Helped Lift ARPDAU

Chess.com mobile’s ARPDAU growth during this era was a function of packing more value into subscriptions and promoting them more deliberately.

Game Review, which helps analyse players’ completed games (limited versus unlimited analysis for non-subscribers versus subscribers), received a major redesign in July 2024 and Albert Cheng, Chief Growth Officer of Chess.com, confirmed that these changes increased the feature’s usage by +25%, subscription purchases by +20%, and a general improvement to retention. Play Coach, an AI opponent that teaches during games, and Celebrity Coaches subsequently gave the learning experience more depth and personality from 2025 onwards.

Subscription sales were also run to create more ARPDAU spikes. The November 2025 Black Friday campaign and May 2026 Spring Sale offered eligible users 50% off the Premium subscription on both web and mobile. Monthly mobile ARPDAU rose +41% and +15% month-over-month, respectively. Chess.com also described them as its most successful special offer and mid-year sale to date.

Driver #4: Events, Creators, and Coverage Kept Refilling the Top-of-the-Funnel

After making its owned events, creator collaborations, and live event coverage engine core distribution infrastructure during the Audience Breakout era, Chess.com continued expanding the same during the Scale Compounds era. Together, these activities gave Chess.com repeated opportunities to refill their top-of-the-funnel rather than relying on another breakout viral wave.

The scale of this engine continued to remain substantial. Chess.com reported 572K peak viewers for the 2023 World Championship, followed by major coverage moments around the 2024 Candidates, Olympiad and World Championship, alongside its own Speed Chess and Champions Chess Tour finals. December 2024 particularly stood out as downloads rose +32% MoM and MAU grew +7% MoM as Gukesh’s become world champion, the Tour finals, and World Rapid & Blitz overlapped.

Further, creator collaboration events became more targeted. Spanish-language PogChamps opened another audience segment in 2025, while PogChamps 6 offered viewers 14 days of free Diamond membership for linking their accounts and watching two hours of the stream. This extended a tactic already used at the 2023 Champions Chess Tour finals — a concrete bridge from watching chess to trying the paid product.

Chess.com’s 2025 Esports World Cup debut added another distribution channel, creating an opportunity to unlock esports audience pools that played games other than chess. Its 2026 return expanded qualification rounds into a year-long circuit that connected its flagship tournaments, thereby augmenting this distribution channel with a recurring event calendar beyond the finals themselves. Meanwhile, Netflix’s Queen of Chess and Untold: Chess Mates supplied fresh mainstream exposure during 2026 too.

As a quick recap, Chess.com mobile grew its average monthly IAP revenue from ~$56K in 2016 to ~$5.9M in 2026 – roughly 105x. That growth unfolded in stages: product and localization improvements built the foundation, cultural moments and an ever-expanding distribution strategy brought in a much larger audience, and continued investments in retention and monetization helped a growing audience compound in value for the business.

While the chess boom over the last decade should not be ignored as a strong tailwind for Chess.com mobile’s acceleration, turning temporary attention into a durable business clearly required considerably more than being in the right place at the right time. Said differently, Chess.com mobile’s stellar growth is not only about mastering distribution and getting more people to try chess, but also about mastering product by becoming better at retaining newly acquired downloads and giving them something worth paying for.

For mobile game developers, five lessons stand out:

1. Build for the audience you want to acquire, or cannot see coming. Localization, accessible onboarding, and a stronger mobile experience positioned Chess.com to serve audience pools that went well beyond its original enthusiast base. The retention improvements resulting from these initiatives also drove Chess.com mobile’s growing separation between MAU and downloads, which is arguably more important than any one download spike. A product that can retain and re-engage players over the long-term makes successive waves of attention more valuable – reducing the need to continually replace departing users. Cultural moments are difficult to manufacture, but being well-equipped to make the most of them is not.
2. Creators can become a durable distribution advantage. Chess.com invested in an ecosystem of creator relationships, formats, and personalities that reached beyond established chess enthusiasts. Evolving those formats and working with creators in new markets helped keep the strategy relevant. The takeaway for developers is not simply to sponsor popular creators, but to build experiences their audiences genuinely want to participate in.
3. Keep creating new routes to the product. Initiatives like an owned competition calendar, real-world tournament broadcasts, and expansion into esports gave Chess.com’s target audience pools multiple ways to enter the product. They also gave Chess.com repeatable distribution pathways to reach audiences in between unpredictable viral moments. Some of these pathways brought outside audiences into its ecosystem, while others took chess to places those audiences already gathered. Building both inbound and outbound distribution infrastructure reduces dependence on any one acquisition channel and creates distribution advantages that can compound over time.
4. Give familiar gameplay new reasons to matter. Chess.com didn’t need to reinvent chess to make its app more engaging. Features like Bot challenges, Puzzle Rush, and League progression added gameplay variety and fresh goals around the same core. The takeaway is to make returning worthwhile, not simply to run more live-ops events.
5. Monetize what players already want to achieve. Chess.com’s subscription proposition builds on the desire to master the game, with analysis and coaching helping players understand their mistakes and what to work on next. While short-term sales and promotions can encourage a purchase, the long-term chase to keep improving (and maybe one day become a chess grandmaster) gives players a reason to keep paying. Finding that alignment between long-term player motivations and monetization strategy is key, and any day worth more than a discount alone.

Looking ahead, Chess.com’s most interesting product ambition is to make improvement more personal. In an August interview, CEO Erik Allebest described prototypes for an interactive coach that reviews a player’s recent games, recommends what to work on, and can discuss that feedback with them. Product director Dylan Rittman has also outlined plans for full-game coaching summaries, training drawn from players’ own games, and more human-like bots. All these efforts could make the game mastery journey considerably clearer. Mobile rollout dates remain unconfirmed, but the opportunity is a natural extension of the app’s existing coaching and analysis experience to further strengthen retention and the subscription proposition.

The company is also continuing to invest into more distribution expansion opportunities. Chess.com’s Q2 report signaled two new YouTube series slated to enter production in Q3. Meanwhile, a chess film, “Grandmasters”, is scheduled for a nationwide theatrical release on October 11, 2026. Further, chess will feature in November’s inaugural Esports Nations Cup, whose regional qualifiers ran on Chess.com. While none of these guarantee another acquisition wave, together they show a continued effort to keep expanding the platform’s distribution playbook in new (and hopefully fruitful) ways.

On a closing note, and as an interesting thought exercise – what would another 100x require? From today’s ~$5.9M monthly average, it would mean roughly $590M per month – an entirely different scale of ambition. Pursuing that over the next decade would likely require a substantially larger global audience and a much more valuable relationship with each player. Making occasional players more regular, helping returning players rebuild the habit, and giving committed players more personalised guidance could all expand the business. While another cultural wave could help, it’s not something the platform can bet on. Accessible play, trusted competition, and broader distribution would still need to bring newcomers in. World Chess cites an estimated 600 million chess players worldwide, and it’s likely slowly growing. Chess.com currently has a little over 250 million registered players. While room for new audience acquisition likely exists, the bigger opportunity for Chess.com mobile probably lies in turning occasional interest into regular, paying participation.

Whatever the next multiple turns out to be, Chess.com’s first 100x is a remarkable achievement. Its journey shows what strong leadership, sustained strategic focus, and years of operational excellence can build around a game that is centuries old – and we at Naavik continue to root for the team.

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• NC has spent more than $300M acquiring four mobile game companies that together operate around 200 live mobile games: Vietnam’s Lihuhu, South Korea’s Springcomes, Slovenia’s Moving Eye and German rewarded-gaming platform JustPlay. NC plans to continue acquiring profitable studios with established titles generating between $50M and $100M annually, while also looking to expand into more markets including Japan, China, India, and Türkiye. Additionally, NC is using acquisitions to expand beyond the MMO games on which it built its business and establish a larger position in mobile casual. Buying studios with profitable live games not only provides immediate revenue, it also gives access to valuable player data, with NC now bringing data from across the portfolio into a shared system to benefit production, live-ops, and user acquisition. This means that a successful approach from one studio can potentially be applied across many of its games, while the developers continue to operate independently. So NC is not simply assembling a collection of studios; it is trying to build a mobile publishing platform that becomes more effective as its portfolio grows.

Supercell signs deal to acquire the rest of Metacore and bring Merge Mansion into its live portfolio

• Supercell has signed a deal to acquire the remaining shares in Merge Mansion developer Metacore, having already been its largest shareholder. The transaction is expected to close by the end of September, although its terms have not been disclosed. Once completed, Merge Mansion, which to date has generated more than $800M in lifetime revenue and 65M downloads, will join Supercell’s live games portfolio alongside titles including Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars, and Hay Day. The acquisition gives Supercell an established game in the casual merge category, while also making it a turnraound project. Merge Mansion’s growth has plateaued as competition in the merge-2 category has increased, while Metacore has failed to launch a second game globally. This led the studio to recently cut 159 roles and close its operations in Germany and Sweden earlier this year. Bringing Merge Mansion into Supercell gives the game access to a company with extensive experience in live operations and user acquisition. The challenge will be using those capabilities to return the game to growth in a category it created but no longer leads.

Sony Music Japan to acquire 23% stake in GungHo Online Entertainment

• Sony Music Entertainment Japan will acquire a 23.29% stake in GungHo Online Entertainment for ¥28.6B ($179M). The transaction is expected to close on December 30, 2026, subject to regulatory clearance, making Sony Music GungHo’s largest shareholder. The two companies plan to explore joint development and operation, as well as new projects based on Sony Music’s IP. GungHo brings more than a decade of experience operating Puzzle & Dragons, while Sony Music subsidiary Aniplex has mobile-game experience through Fate/Grand Order and connections to anime and music properties. Together, these capabilities could support new mobile titles and IP collaborations, particularly in Japan’s character-driven market. However, no specific project has been announced. The current significance is therefore a closer strategic relationship between two established mobile-game businesses, not a confirmed new release.

In Other News

Product & Marketing

• Where Winds Meet tops 100M players worldwide
• CookieRun: Crumble tops ₩20B in cumulative sales one month after launch
• Pixel Flow generates $198.4M in gross player spending in its first year
• Overwatch Rush enters soft launch in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia
• Hololive Dreams generates an estimated $57.2M in first-month mobile player spending
• ANANTA confirms its launch date
• PUBG Mobile Light opened pre-registration
• Monster Hunter Outlanders opens pre-registration and unveils Ruger Aida
• Duolingo partners with Eggy Party in China

Companies & Capital

• AppsFlyer has secured a $400M credit line from Bank Leumi
• Rovio closes Copenhagen studio following Sonic Blitz cancellation
• Supercell London GM Lasse Seppänen Leaves to Start His Own Studio
• Savvy Games Group CEO Brian Ward departs
• East Side Games cuts its workforce by 32% through layoffs and furloughs
• Surge Games raises a $3M pre-seed round
• PeopleFun and Lion Studios appoint new CEOs
• Takahouse raises $1.5M

Platform, Technology & Tools

• Google agrees to a proposed £260M UK Play Store developer settlement
• Phil Schiller steps back from overseeing the App Store
• Apple faces a proposed £2B UK collective action over ATT
• Unity 6.6 becomes available

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Content Worth Consuming

Retention in an AI Companion Game Deconstructed (deconstructoroffun): “The difference is what the payoff is made of: you find out who your character is under pressure. This is where our stickiest players show up: on adventure days, nearly 30% are back seven days later.”

MDM Mailbag #8 with Thomas Petit (mobiledevmemo): “Thomas and I discuss the current state of measurement, the necessity of incrementality testing, and the challenges of scaling creative production in an automated environment. We also dive into the technical and ethical considerations of web-to-app funnels, as well as the ongoing legal battles surrounding app store commissions.”

Japan Gaming 2026: The Games, Strategies, and IP Defining a Global Powerhouse (Sensor Tower): “Over the past 12 months, Japan generated over USD $10 billion (¥1.56 Trillion) in mobile game IAP revenue, ranking second in Asia behind China’s iOS market. Although revenue declined 5.1% year over year, Japan still generated more than twice as much as South Korea and nearly four times as much as Taiwan, highlighting its enduring position as one of Asia’s most valuable mobile gaming markets.”

What Supercell learned from upsetting Clash Royale players (mobilegamer.biz): “And yet, as community manager Emilia Russell explained, it caused real discontent among those hardcore players that were using it, resulting in a flurry of negative comments and even a dip in the game’s star rating on Google Play, as it was effectively review-bombed by disgruntled players.”

Inside a mobile game’s first year (Moloco): “Whales don’t show up on day one. Only 15% of a title’s eventual top spenders make their first purchase in month one — many are still arriving in month six or later. Titles that judge success by D7 or D30 payback alone are often cutting winners too early.”

Why discovery and monetisation are converging in 2026 (pocketgamer.biz): “The prediction for the second half of 2026 is that publishers stop running them as separate programmes. The businesses that pull ahead will treat discovery and payment as one loop.”

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