Just a month after launching a Texas Hold’em game on its website, Yahoohas announced that it will be shutting the game down at the end of the year. Fortunately for those concerned with the image of poker, this is not a poker-only closure, but rather the end of all “Classic Yahoo Parlor games.”

On its “Games Help” page, Yahoo gave the reason for the elimination of the games, saying, “In January 2014, changes in supporting technologies and increased security requirements for our Yahoo web pages made it impossible to keep the games running. Following these technological advancements, the old parlor games were incompatible, insecure, and no longer functioning correctly.”

Yahoo added that it does plan on bringing back some of the games once it can develop new versions of them that meet the proper technological standards. It said the most popular games will have the best chance of returning, but the overall games roster will likely look different than it did before. There was no specific mention of poker.

Contrary to the explanation on Yahoo’s games page, Sean Hamel, PR Manger for Yahoo Games, told Forbes‘ Marc Edelman that security was not the reason for the games shutdown. He said they will be taken off the site as part of “efforts to streamline our product offerings and focus our energy and resources on developing for Yahoo’s core experiences.”

A month ago, Yahoo caught the attention of the poker world when it launched Texas Hold’em while at the same time advertising it heavily on its highly-trafficked fantasy football page. As most readers frequenting this site likely know, fantasy football is played by millions of people around the world and Yahoo is one of the most popular destinations for those participating in fantasy football leagues.

There is also a huge overlap between the poker demographic and fantasy sports players, so pushing its poker site on its fantasy football site made perfect sense for Yahoo. At the same time, the excitement over the poker launch was a bit overblown, as it was simply a play money site.

Yahoo also mentioned that when the classic games are brought back, they will still be free to play, but may offer “boosts” for purchase. These types of boosts are very common in social gaming, giving players the opportunity to buy an item that may give a temporary or permanent advantage in the game, offer more playing time, or may just be window dressing. These boosts do not typically cost much money, sometimes with prices as low as a few cents, but when millions of people play a game, each micro-transaction adds up quickly for the game provider.

Yahoo did launch a real money poker site on the International Poker Network about seven years ago, which got people extremely excited since a major mainstream internet company was getting involved in gambling, but it never amounted to much of anything and eventually faded away.

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