On the other hand the most popular way to play shogi online is an app called Shogi Wars, which has the most explicit pay-to-win mechanic I've ever seen: there's a button you can press to have an AI play out your next few moves for you, and you can pay money to buy additional chances to press the button.
Shogi doesn't have any other sites as modern and polished as Lichess or Chess.com (except for a Lichess port (lishogi.org) which has failed to gain traction), so I think there was a vacuum that allowed something like this to become popular. If people were still playing chess only on old clunky websites then maybe Zynga would break into the market with a hot new chess app that requires Facebook login.
Shogi doesn't have any other sites as modern and polished as Lichess or Chess.com (except for a Lichess port (lishogi.org) which has failed to gain traction), so I think there was a vacuum that allowed something like this to become popular. If people were still playing chess only on old clunky websites then maybe Zynga would break into the market with a hot new chess app that requires Facebook login.