After a long 17 years in the online game portal, Yahoo Games has finally bitten the bullet and shut down its services this past week.
The news comes in after Yahoo reported they would lay off about 15 percent of their company and workforce. Along with the shutdown of Yahoo Games, Yahoo announced that it will shut down and consolidate many of its services such as Smart TV products and Digital Magazine initiatives.
From 1998, Yahoo launched Yahoo Games after the company bought out a website named Games Domain, which hasn’t been touched in the past few years. This lead to the reason of the announced shutdown. Up until 2014, Yahoo shut down most of its older versions of games for technological reasons that resulted in a drastic drop of visitors to the site.
Many in their youth will fondly remember their time in the early 2000s with the online Flash-based games, as many spent countless of hours on games such as spades and chess.
Yahoo Games was an easy and accessible website that welcomed both young and old to its popular website. At its time, it was a pioneer portal for causal games, with the service that expanded throughout the last decade. Venture Beat reported in 2008 that the gamer hub had generated more than 18 million visitors per month.
The decline of Yahoo Games was inevitable as the service moved towards the mobile market, Yahoo became less central in the modern internet.
Now Yahoo Games is largely forgotten, though it still holds its core values and has a small active gamer journalism presence with a review of the new X-COM 2 posted just last week.
Of course, gaming is of much higher quality today, but Yahoo Games will always hold a special place in our hearts.