Author: John Merlino
Date: 10:47:16 10/29/04
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On October 29, 2004 at 09:25:50, Tony Petters wrote: > >A Mature Market means the product no longer has significant improvements, so >there is no point in getting involved in it commercially. An example would be >wordprocessors. > >We all use to fight tooth and nail on rgcc and ccc to get what we want on new >software releases, now it seems the vast majority have been added, even test >suites. > >It seems with all the great great software available both commercially and >amateur that there is little room for improvement left. > >For example Fritz has virtually every function a person could ever dream of and >the graphics are certainly adequate for play. > >Perhaps, some of you have an opinion on this. > >Cordially In my humble opinion, chess software has been a "mature market" for many years already. When Sierra decided to drop the "Power Chess" line because they couldn't put much of a dent in Chessmaster sales, that pretty much sealed it. It was pretty obvious that if a big software developer like Sierra (at least as big as Mindscape at that time) wouldn't bother to compete with us, then we had a pretty strong hold on the chess software market. That was about six years ago. Then, last year, Fluent Entertainment (via our insanely huge publisher, Vivendi Universal) decided to try cutting into CM's sales by releasing a basic software package, called Majestic Chess, that had one significant new feature -- the Chess Adventure. This feature was very well-received by the press and by the people who bought the program, but sales were very disappointing, and development of Majestic Chess II was suspended indefinitely (although Fluent hopes to eventually release a sequel). Between Chessmaster in North America (and small but not insignificant sales throughout the rest of the world) and Chessbase in Europe (and somewhat in North America), I would say that this has been a two horse race for quite some time. jm
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