Wow! How about that. Do I get a gold plaque from YouTube now? I still remember celebrating 100,000 in 2021:

And if we really go back, 100 in 2019:

I guess I like round numbers. If you haven't passed it yet, I recommend celebrating your one billion second birthday.

Daily Installs

These days I seem to get about 300 new installs a day. At peak, I seem to recall 2000 or so. So it was easy to calculate when I'd reach this milestone, even months out!

True Total

It was easier to count total installs when ChessCraft was only available on one platform. I actually half celebrated privately weeks ago, because if you count purchases on Steam and the Apple App Store that adds several thousand so I reached the one million milestone earlier.

The vast majority of installs are still on Google Play - makes sense since that's free. That has always driven the community to continue to refresh itself - all without advertisement. We passed one million on September 17th.

Of course, I'm not surprised at this point that Google is slow to update all its systems with this new information. The public page still shows the previous rounded milestone:

Roadmap

I don't have much to say about any future roadmap. I have big dreams for small and large features still, but ChessCraft has been such a long journey and I'm tired. I would hire a c# computer scientist to help breathe new life into the project but I hardly get any applicants. I've not posted the job anywhere in awhile.

To renew my resolve on this project, I've taken a mental break from ChessCraft by doing courses for an online master's in computer science and just relaxing and playing games. Curiously, playing games until I've min-maxed them to death makes me want to build them.

Community

Did you know ChessCraft is the "World's Largest Chess Variant Database"? At least, that's what I say on the home page and nobody is contesting it yet. I should really do a big analysis, deduplication, and cleanup of all those user submissions sometime...

To this day, there seems to be almost zero truly inappropriate image uploads from users. Incredible! Thanks for being such a nice community.