14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo! is axing more services in its masterplan to focus only on eight of its core services, which will be Mail, Search, Flickr, Tumblr, News, Sports, Finance, and Lifestyle.
In a statement released today, the company has announced it will be shutting down Games, BOSS, Livetext, and some smaller regional media properties.
Goodbye, Yahoo! Games, it's been a pleasure for all those years
By far the most important service Yahoo! is closing this time around is its Games portal. Game makers have been asked to stop accepting payments by March 14 while the service will be shut down for good on Friday, May 13, 2016.
The portal was on its last leg anyway, after Yahoo! removed the vast majority of its games at the end of March 2014, citing security reasons.
Most of the company's games were running on top of Flash and Java, platforms that are becoming more dangerous by the day. Just today it has come to light that Oracle botched a Java Update that left a critical security flaw still active in Java for the past two years.
Other services closing down as well
Besides Games, Yahoo has said that Livetext, a video chat mobile app, will stop operating at the end of March 2016.
Surprisingly, the company has also announced that the relatively successful Yahoo! BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) APIs will also stop working at the end of March 2016.
BOSS and the now-defunct Yahoo! Pipes were two services that developers liked and used on a consistent basis, but the company stopped caring about developers a long time ago anyway, so it didn't make sense to be operating them, as they were a leech on its dwindling profits.
In June 2015, Yahoo! previously closed services such as the aforementioned Pipes, Maps, and the GeoPlanet & PlaceSpotter APIs.
At the end of February, the company announced it was forming a Strategic Review Committee of independent directors, tasked with exploring alternatives, which even included plans for selling the entire company.