Yahoo Games, the once-hopping online game hub best known for its simulacrum of classic board and card games, is shutting down. The news was buried amidst major changes for the company: As we reported Tuesday, Yahoo will lay off roughly 15 percent of the company, downsize across the board, and shutter many offerings, including its TV efforts.
Looking at it now, Yahoo Games is a bevy of free-to-play, branded online games, not terribly different in design or presentation from what you'd find in the free section of the App Store or Google Play. It wasn't always that way. From 1998, when Yahoo launched Yahoo Games after acquiring a site called Games Domain, until 2014, when it shut down most of the old versions of those games for technological reasons, the site was a hub for simple parlor games, set inside straightforward online applets and open to all.
That may not seem like much now, but at the time it was pioneering, a bustling portal for casual games before we called them that. The service expanded through the last decade, roping in more complex, ad-supported titles. Venture Beat reported in 2008 that the hub had more than 18 million unique visitors each month.
Its decline was inevitable as the niche it filled moved to the mobile market, and as Yahoo itself became less central to the modern internet. Now, Yahoo Games is largely forgotten, though it still holds some gems and has a small but active gaming journalism presence that reviewed X-COM 2 just three days ago.
In its heyday, though, Yahoo Games was a easily accessible, surprisingly welcoming and exceedingly popular place to play. I remember in the early 2000s seeing my mother, who hasn't touched a video game since the NES, spend hours on it, playing pick-up games of spades and befriending Internet strangers in the attached chat rooms. I used it to hone, and subsequently give up on, my chess skills. The folks on Yahoo were pretty good, so much so that it was considered, for a time, one of the best places to play chess on the Internet.
CORRECTION: This article, and its headline, originally claimed that Yahoo Games had existed for 13 years. In fact, it was acquired in 1998, and thus would have been 18 years old in March.
