Yahoo Games was shut down this year, nobody noticed, and what does that say abut the Web?

I went to graduate school in 1998, coming back from Japan, and it was the first time I went online on a regular basis (as was true of many people at the time). I had a fast connection in the Purdue computer lab, and suddenly there was… online chess! Free! And not just on Yahoo but also on a long-dead portal called Excite. Stuff like this was blowing up online. It was a world of new wonders.

I played on Yahoo Chess from 1998 to 2013, when Yahoo just said, “Fuck it, we can’t be assed to do this.” They shut down most or all of their multiplayer games that year, but the puzzle games you could play against the computer remained. This year, games.yahoo.com ceased to exist completely. I saw no outcry about this anywhere unless I googled for it, and even then there wasn’t much at all.

To me, however, it seems like a major milestone. There are several layers of sad here:

• Yahoo used to be a great company. Big. Important. And it gave you a bunch of free information and stuff. Now it’s a pathetic dying POS that is leaking private information.

• No game site that I know of has come along to replace the game experience on Yahoo. There was sooo much stuff on there. I also played hearts, spades, and a lot of the puzzle games. Please tell me if there is a site where you can do all that now. Obviously, there are good chess sites (I still mean to join one one of these days).

• So the Internet can’t really support a fun portal with all kinds of stuff like that? Apparently not. And if you were old enough to go online in the late 90s, you remember how much potential it all seemed to have. We are living in a time of diminished fun and expectations online.

Now wait before you slam me for that last line about diminished fun and expectations. I am not comparing 2016 and 1998. We have it much better now. But if you compare 2016 and, say, 2012, what is better? In 2012, we had Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… pretty much everything we have now. But things seemed a lot more hopeful and “up” then. Still on the rise. Here are some things that have changed since then:

• RIP Yahoo Games. :frowning:

• I can’t find the link, but I read an article on Salon the other day about a ton of websites laying off personnel. No one can make money at this shit any more, it seems. Salon has been delivering less and less since like 2002, it seems, but it too just announced more layoffs: http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/04/layoffs-hit-salon-004466

• People have basically quit blogging. Andrew Sullivan burned out, for example. A ton of blogs I used to read are defunct or close to it. (I haven’t updated my own blog since 2009. Why? I don’t feel like the level of attention I would get would be worth the effort. I have guest-posted frequently on a blog that does get a lot of views, however.)

• People on YouTube are burning out. Here’s a funny guy I watch on YT with over 3M subscribers talking about how it’s no fun for him any more: I Do Not Enjoy Making YouTube Videos (+ End Mini Vlog) - YouTube I am seeing major channels crash and burn in real time: people with huge subscriber bases just not adding content any more.

• Twitter’s user base growth has stalled. The site makes no money. The nastiness of the trolls on there is also causing power users to burn out and quit.

• And what is new and exciting online? In mobile, there are some fairly recent things like Uber and Tinder. Airbnb, I guess. If I’m missing something mind-blowing, let me know.

Let me contextualize all the above by saying I am grateful for the online experience and would not choose to do without it. I would also say the above is part of a society-wide burnout with respect to media, content, work, politics, the economy… basically everything. And this is global society, not just US society. I would describe our current times as a very Yin era in which people find it hard to get off the dime and make things happen. And it seems like the only websites that are making real coin these days are Facebook and Google. Which, if we go back to the late 1990s, early 2000s, everyone was dreaming big: I’ll make a website… and advertise! I’ll promote myself online!

It doesn’t seem to have worked out too well. Thoughts?

All that says to me is people are slowly realizing that just having a Wordpress template or a YouTube account + webcam doesn’t mean you actually have anything interesting to say.

That’s what the demise of Yahoo Games means to you?!

Yahoo stopped innovating, or at least stopped being part of the innovation that drew people. And even if they had been innovating in the field of puzzle games, they would have moved to mobile apps.

Blogs and YouTube-channels rise and fall. That’s the nature of the game.

Twitter might find a way to survive long term, but it’s difficult to predict.

I don’t think yahoo is a particularly good example to try to draw conclusions about the web from, it was always a split personality trying to be a bunch of different things and got crushed by actors doing the separate things separate and better. But looking at various providers over the last 20 odd years I think we can say that you can rise quite fast and quite high on attracting totally new users, but it’s really hard to predict how long it lasts and who has to change or die.

Did you not just finish linking the demise of Yahoo Games with a general entropy of the web, and mention blogging and YouTube specifically?

I guess the question is: Is anyone innovating online these days? (I do give Uber and Airbnb credit, though those are obviously not online services per se.) Just as the “killer apps” for PCs ended basically with word processing, spreadsheets, games, and web clients, have the killer online/mobile apps basically been discovered at this point?

I think the nature of the game has become more apparent over time. I think there was early enthusiasm for both because early adopters got extra attention in a limited market from users to whom the technology/experience was new. Thing is, new major blogs do not seem to be rising, and the consensus seems to be that it is now very difficult to become a major YT star, and even few of those make big money.

I think it’s easy to predict that it will not survive. What’s difficult to predict is the year of death. So many people are invested in it at this point that it will be hard to pull the plug on it. I would guess 2020, RIP.

Yes and no, I would say. It lost search to Google early on, but it had little competition as a “portal” after 2000. So it could be that the whole portal business model was not viable in the first place. I’m not sure if any of the pieces Yahoo has offered have proven to be viable as breakouts on their own, other than search.

True. The landscape seems to have gotten tougher over time, however.

Yahoo! has been a badly run company for a long time.

The long, ongoing security breach is an example of their many, many problems.

For a major Internet company you are either growing or shrinking (relative to your competition). The first is a must. Once you are in the second group, it’s time to sell the company* and go home.

Over and over again other companies ate its lunch. The first big blow was losing the search engine wars to Google. And on and on. Now it’s a legacy email/spam provider.

  • Yahoo! turned down a nice bid from Microsoft. MS offered $45B in 2008. Verizon bought the smoking ruins for $4.8B this year. If it wasn’t for its shares in Alibaba, it would have completely cratered much sooner.

As I see is, the internet has miniaturized and portablized. Decades ago, the internet was desined to be used by people sitting at home with big screens and keyboards. Now the user field is dominated by people with hand-held devices waiting for the traffic light to turn green. So the internet market has shifted to the new user demogaphic.

Yahoo should’ve stopped being a thing in the early 2000s, they should’ve completely sold up and reconfigured into something else, but they persisted even though their “search engine” was an unwieldy spaghetti even in its heydey. After that they were a day late and a dollar short at every step.

Even though it’s hard to look at it this way, the internet is still new and figuring itself out. Every time it looks like it’s approaching an equilibrium, something upsets everything again, either an unexpected failure or a sudden success, and it adjusts, sometimes with great volatility. Social Media has reached that stage, where it seems like it’s reached its full potential and there’s no more growth, but the truth is there’s an upper limit, everyone who wants to utilise it is on it already, and they’ve found their level of comfort. The only way it can go is down. The key is to not see that as a failure and panic, jumping ship, and instead ride the storm until it rises again, when some new innovation breathes new life into it. It’s a dip, not a crash.

Facebook is crucial for families and friends. Twitter is crucial for news and entertainment. Instagram is crucial for photography. Youtube is crucial for video. Even if they died for some reason, an exact equivalent would take their place, as they need to exist now.

Something new will come along soon, something unexpected rather than calculated, and the Net will be a vibrant place again soon enough.

Oh, no! Not Andrew Sullivan!

Sadist that I am, Yahoo has become my go-to site for news, even though I hate it. I’ve tried other news sites as CNN, but they have the same formula. Sponsors with irrelevant source material make up a quarter of the links, and attention-getting headlines that ignore context are the rule. Yahoo will at least try to balance out the ideologues, as they link to Huffington Post as much as Fox News, but every major news source has its share of bias to lure readers. It’s too hard to find factual reporting.

Another example of how pathetic Yahoo is right now:

I’ve used them to look at the Yen/Dollar exchange rate for years. The page showed the rate and had a bunch of relevant stories beneath that. There was no need for change.

They recently revamped the page, but now all the stories are gone, and at the bottom of the page it says: “We’re sorry we weren’t able to find anything about this topic.”

Right. So either they don’t have the content any more (possible), or someone fucked up the code so that the stories don’t appear any more (likely). If the latter, I guess there’s no one around to notice the fuckup and set things right. Nice.

news.google.com doesn’t work for you? I find that I can get a bead on most of the major topics by reading Salon and Slate, but when there is a story breaking in real time, I typically go to google.

In terms of money, you mean? It seems that, yes, after 2000, they were constantly getting hammered in the press for not making dough, but to me the user experience wasn’t bad. IOW, their online stuff wasn’t bad but didn’t make money in the aggregate. Agree?

Agreed. The word that constantly comes to mind is “plastic.” Not being physical, the product can be changed into anything at any time. Facebook could be done 10,000 different ways, and we’ve seen about 150 of them since its inception. It’s only real strength is the fairly high switching cost of its user base. I don’t think Google+ will ever succeed, but another social network could arise at any time and destroy FB almost overnight, just as it destroyed MySpace.

I actually think a lot of things have peaked and more winnowing will occur. I think, for example, we have reached “Peak Content,” in which there is an oversupply of news, listicles, blog posts (such as remain), Tweets, memes, etc., and sites trying to make money off same. It’s not sustainable.

You could substitute any two communication media in there and still be correct.

I think the issue is the point at which a new communication channel becomes irrelevant to its content, and is judged on content alone. We’ve just watched twenty years of “new media” become darlings in their own rights, where saying some tired, stupid, wornout or incomprehensible thing was cool just because it was on that platform.

Blogs and video channels are no longer interesting in and of themselves, but are being judged on content… which means your average Joe with about three coherent thoughts is no longer paid much attention to when he discovers WordPress.

There have to be at least a dozen facebook games that will let you play hearts and whatever, right?

The reason Yahoo Games shut down is that most of the players moved elsewhere.

Gotta call “cite!” on that. I know for a fact that Yahoo Chess was as busy as it had been in years when it got shut down in 2013. It was a going concern. I have to assume it was the case for most of the other multiplayer games.

I also gotta ask “cite?” about places where one can play hearts, spades, etc., with real people. Those two games require foursomes and are hard to set up. I’ve seen two-player games on FB like “Words With Friends” but not four-player. Now, I’m sure I’ll be proven wrong about something in this regard, and I’ll be happy to have my ignorance erased, but Yahoo let you do a ton of games with one login and in one place.

don’t they have games built into windows now that’s multiplayer ? also things like pogo have distracted most users in fact heres the first thing when I type online chess :
Play Chess Online Free - Checkmate!
Ad · www.Pogo.com/Online-Chess · Site secured by Norton
Checkmate! Play With Friends Or Make New Ones at Pogo.com®.
Online Chess games for free at Pogo.com. Play against the computer …
Puzzle, Board, Card Games· Over 100+ Games· Play Scrabble & Monopoly

heres the link with tons of other sites :

But a lot of the free game sites like that are gone msn still has games on it but a lot of them are the same ones ya see on face book

But if you like games of all kinds go to kongerate.com

I remember when pogo popped up on aol and ea killed off all the other games with the exclusive contracts … they even tried to kill off the aol RP chat rooms but we revolted against that and they kept them…

Frankly, I’m more surprised the rest of Yahoo is still around.

There was a little bit of public attention and nostalgia when Geocities shut down. I think that might have been because a lot of people (of a certain age :p) first had their own webpages there, or at least had some formative internet experience there. Yahoo Games may have had unique breadth in its offerings, but the individual games were all items that can be found in some form at other places (including on one’s phone, as others have noted). I think it was just too generic to provoke much of a response from the general public when it went away.

None of that is to say that no one misses the site, though, and it sounds from the OP like there probably was a dedicated core of multi-player users right up to the end who have lost out.