Yahoo! Games

» see games.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

yahoo games launched in april 1998 as a free browser-based gaming portal. the catalog had classic table games and card games. pool, chess, checkers, hearts, spades, dominoes, backgammon, gin, euchre, bridge. you logged in with your yahoo id, picked a game, and got matched with random strangers from around the world.

i played yahoo pool a lot in 2003 to 2005 from internet kafelers in turkey when i was at university. the game opened in a small java popup window. you set up a rack, picked a stick power, aimed with the mouse. simple physics. it just worked. half the people in any internet kafe i went to had a yahoo pool table open at some point in the afternoon.

yahoo started shutting down the games portal in stages from 2014. on 30 april 2014 most of the multiplayer games stopped working. the remaining single-player and offline games kept running for two more years. by april 2016 the entire yahoo games suite was offline.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it had ~

the catalog was wide. table games for casual players. card games for the older audience. a few arcade-style games for kids. each game ran in a java applet that opened in a popup window. you would have multiple game windows open at once if you were grinding pool while waiting for a hearts table to fill.

matchmaking was simple. you picked a game, you saw a list of open tables, you joined one, or you created a new table and waited for someone to join. there was a small chat box at the side where you could talk to your opponent. some people were friendly. some were quiet. some were unbeatable veterans who would crush you in three turns.

the audience was wider than the typical gaming audience. yahoo games attracted older users who had yahoo email accounts and wanted something to do online. there were chess players in their seventies playing every day. there were retirees on dominoes tables for hours. it felt like a community center mixed with an arcade.

~ the pool tables ~

yahoo pool had specific table rules. 8-ball, mostly. you broke the rack with the cue ball. you had to call your shots on the eight ball. scratching on the eight ball lost you the game. there were three table sizes for different difficulty levels.

in turkey, internet kafelar in 2003 to 2005 always had at least one person playing yahoo pool. it was something to do between games of counter-strike. one round of cs. one game of pool. another round of cs. the cycle would last hours. yahoo pool had a very specific cultural place: the casual filler game that everybody knew how to play.

the matching was global. i played opponents from spain, brazil, korea, and the US in the same afternoon. nobody could communicate well in the chat box because most of us did not share a language, but the game itself did not need words. you racked. you broke. you played.

~ how it died ~

two things killed yahoo games. java applets and smartphones.

java applets were the technical foundation of yahoo games. by 2010 most browsers were starting to phase out java applet support because of security issues. by 2014 java applets were essentially dead in modern browsers. yahoo would have had to rewrite the entire game suite in javascript or html5 to keep them working. they did not invest in that rewrite.

smartphones changed where casual gaming happened. by 2012 the same audience that had played yahoo pool in internet kafelar was playing candy crush on the bus. yahoo did not have a mobile gaming strategy. by the time they realized they needed one, the audience had already moved on.

the shutdown announcement came in march 2014. on 30 april 2014 most of the multiplayer games went offline. some single-player games kept working through 2015 and into early 2016. by april 2016 the entire suite was retired.

~ what we lost ~

the lobby. yahoo games had real game lobbies where you saw who was waiting to play and who was already in tables. that lobby format does not really exist in modern casual gaming. mobile games are matchmaking-only with no visible lobby. you cannot watch a chess game in progress on a modern app the way you could watch one on yahoo games.

the random global match. you got opponents from anywhere in the world. you did not pick. you did not filter by region. you got whoever was there. that randomness made yahoo games feel like a place where the whole online world was hanging out at once. modern matchmaking optimizes for skill balance and connection latency. it does not give you the global random feeling.

the casual filler game culture. yahoo pool was background gaming. you played it while you were doing something else. you did not need to focus. modern mobile games are designed to take all your attention through engagement loops. a casual filler game that runs in a popup while you do other things is not really part of how mobile gaming works. that whole shape of casual play is gone.

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