Yahoo Closing Games Portal, Other Services In Bid To Streamline Focus

Online game enthusiasts will soon be saying goodbye to one of their earliest gaming options: Yahoo Games. The service, along with several other products, will shutter in coming months as the tech company looks to simplify its business. 

Yahoo announced this week that after “careful evaluation” it decided to drop support for several services such as Games, live video app Livetext, search tool BOSS, and certain regional projects like Astrology, Weather, and Support in some areas of the world.

As of May 13, Yahoo will discontinue the Yahoo Games site and publishing channels.

Livetext will shutter at the end of March. Yahoo says it will “incorporate the learnings and features into Yahoo products including Yahoo Messenger, our core messaging platform.”

Search API and BOSS Hosted Search, as well as the BOSS Placefinder and Placespotter APIs, will cease operations on March 31, as well.

The company says it is using YPA, a new Javascript solution, for publishers who manage their own search engine results pages.

In coming weeks, Yahoo will shut down some regional, genre-specific properties, such as Yahoo Astrology in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, and India.

Additionally, Yahoo Maktoob genre-specific sites including News, Celebrity, Movies, Style, Helwa, Sports and Weather, will close and the pages will redirect to the Yahoo Maktoob homepages in Arabic and English.

[via USA Today]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.