He Gone! Yahoo Poker to Shut Down at Year's End
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.”
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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