Is SparkChess a downloadable product or a subscription service?

When it was introduced in 2008, SparkChess Pro was purely a downloadable product for Windows and Mac.

Over the years, we discovered (the hard way), just how difficult maintaining such a product is: executables need to be signed (and code-signing certificates are costly), some stupid antiviruses block the downloads and we had to contact them and submit samples, users can’t find the downloaded files, upgrades are difficult, and so on.

We started a transition, first to prepaid subscriptions in 2014 and then to recurring ones in 2025. We believe they bring more value to our players, since with the same subscription they can play on any device, but we still maintain the download options, mostly for existing customers.