Yahoo has scrapped its poker platform after just one month, dashing at least immediate hopes that it could offer real money play once the regulatory environment improves. (Image: Yahoo.com)
Yahoo US Online Poker has shut down its play-money Texas Hold’em portal just one month after its launch, citing “changes in supporting technology” and a new product streamlining initiative.
The move came as a surprise to many observers, who had speculated that the internet giant was preparing to monetize its platform once the U.S. regulatory environment becomes more favorable.
The company had already had success raising real money with its fantasy football and fantasy basketball offerings, so real money online poker seemed like the natural next step.
Soon after it began offering poker, Yahoo began promoting it heavily on its fantasy football website, which Forbes called “the holy grail of young adult male advertising space.”
But talk of a new Yahoo-driven online poker boom is a bit premature: Yahoo recently shut down all of its Classic Yahoo Parlor games because changing technology meant it could no longer host them.
“In January 2014, changes in supporting technology and increased security requirements for Yahoo web pages prevented us from continuing to run our games,” the company explained in a statement. “These technological advances made our older parlor games incompatible, unsafe or no longer function properly.”
Poker door left open
Yahoo plans to gradually develop new versions of its most popular games as part of a long-term project, and may even return to online poker in the future. PR marketing manager Sean Hamel told Forbes this week that the shutdown of the Texas Hold’em portal was not for security reasons, but was part of an effort to “streamline our product offering and focus our energy and resources on developing Yahoo’s core experience.”
Yahoo may be shifting its focus to the lucrative world of social gaming. While Yahoo Chess, for example, has always been hugely popular, it’s hard to ignore the growth of the far more lucrative social gaming industry in recent years.
The company recently announced that its new platform, the Yahoo Games Network, will give third-party social game developers access to a vast distribution network estimated to reach approximately 800 million potential gamers.
Social Game Focus
Since Marissa Mayer became CEO in 2012, Yahoo has acquired a number of social gaming companies, including Loki Games, Cloud Party, and cross-platform gaming infrastructure provider Playerscale. The creation of the Yahoo Games Network underscores the company’s new focus as it covets Facebook’s social gaming revenues. Facebook recently reported that in just one quarter of 2013, more than 100 game developers generated more than $1 million in revenue, and users spent more than $1.5 billion on social games alone.
Yahoo also announced the Yahoo Classic Games Network, which will allow users to play touchscreen-enabled games across multiple platforms, many of which will eventually be offered through the Yahoo Games Network.