Ultimate Battle (UB), India’s first-ever one-stop esports platform, had recently conducted a study to understand the gaming preferences of users and close to a lac gamers’ playing choices were studied in which chess featured among the top three preferred games that was opted by players on the UB platform. The popularity of chess prompted UB to launch an independent interface for chess on its platform for the dedicated community to not only play for fun but compete against best in the business.
The popular esports platform UB, though, has been a destination for playing many action-packed games with high-end graphics, the study, however, indicated the gamers’ preference for chess in the list among the top three games. Garena Free Fire topped the list as the most played game with 40% preference while with 30% players preferring, Call of Duty is the second most played game. And a surprise third name on the list with 20% of the players sampled opting has been for the chequered board game while other games put together made the last 10% on the platform.
Talking about the launch, Tarun Gupta, Founder of Ultimate Battle said: “Chess is an age-old game which is played by people of all age groups. We thought of giving this community an altogether premium experience and hence we launched chess as separate property and not dilute the audience experience with other games. We also have created leaderboards for the community to compete professionally and the aim is to find the champion players eventually.”
He further added, “However, the rampant rise of online cheating was equally alarming and we wanted to keep the UB platform safe from any such unfair means. Our focus has been to create a very robust technology to counter such incidences and we are glad that the platform has seen a lot of buzz lately.”
After a successful testing phase, with 3000 gamers in January this year, the UB chess platform has already built a strong community of more than 27,000 regular users. The platform has witnessed maximum engagement from the age group between 18 and 21, close to about 53%. Currently, three chess tournaments are organized daily along with hundreds of one-on-one challenge matches regularly. The ranking system is in place too as part of the automated leader board based on the performances of the players. It also has prize money for the winners.
The platform has also launched its app last month on Google Play Store and till now has seen over 32,000 downloads already.
