As someone who is working on a similar project (a chess mmo) and looking to validate a business model in order to get funding, how are they covering the costs?
The answer usually is "donations", but there are only 402 patrons on https://lichess.org/patron and Thibault said on twitter that the average donation is $8. That's $3216/mo, less than a tenth of monthly costs. Is the rest coming from the swag store? From coaches? How much do the donations surpass the costs? Lots of missing pieces from the revenue puzzle.
Maybe you should look at a model where your chess mmo runs on top of another platform? That way a lot of your costs would go down and you could focus on the core parts that you want to build. E.g. you dont really want to spend time paying for or optimizing for hundreds of simultaneous users from multiple countries.
