Yahoo! Games
From Casual Games Wiki
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 Yahoo Games Founded: ? # Employees: ? full-time, ? part-time/contract |
Yahoo! Games is a section of the Yahoo! website operated by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), a global Internet services company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Yahoo Games offers both free Web games and premium downloadable games. Registered users can play alone or against others. Game categories include: arcade games, board games, card games, puzzle games, word games, download games, multiplayer games, and skill games.
The site also includes a number of community features and an "All-Star" system in which a user can pay to get an All-Star username. All-Star users are able to get extra privileges on Yahoo! Games such as disabling pop-up ads, but they dont have playable games without downloading.
Yahoo! Games also includes Yahoo! Video Games with news, previews and reviews of currently available or upcoming platform games–and Yahoo! Games on Demand–which provides free demos and full-size downloads of full PC games for a charge.
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History
Yahoo! was founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal.
Yahoo! Games launched in March, 1998 after Yahoo!'s acquisition of ClassicGames.com (previously known as SpringerSpan Games after the programmer's Springer Spaniel). The current Yahoo! Video Games section of the site was formerly known as Games Domain, from back when Yahoo! acquired the website in 2003.
Yahoo! Games Timeline
- March 1998 - Yahoo! Games launches [1]
- May 1999 - Yahoo! Games introduces a "Ladder" system that allows players to see where their score ranks compared to other users. [2]
- August 2000 - Yahoo! offers coverage of Magic: The Gathering® World Championships live on the Internet through a Webcast on Yahoo! Games. [3]
- March 2001 - Yahoo Games! adds an expanded selection of casual games, integration with Yahoo! Messenger, and content (news, reviews, previews, cheats, demos, trailers, walk-throughs, Easter-eggs, strategy guides) for video gamers. [4]
- September 2002 - Yahoo! launches Games on Demand, a for-pay games service that offers users the ability to rent and play PC games directly through a streamed service. [5]
- May 2003 - Yahoo! Games announces relationships with UBI Soft Entertainment And Vivendi Universal Games to distribute titles through Yahoo! Games on Demand. [6]
- October 2003 - Yahoo! Games partners with Microsoft Game Studios to offer more than 100 Microsoft titles through Yahoo! Games on Demand. [7]
- December 2004 - Yahoo! Games partners with GameSpot to offer comprehensive PC and video game content to Yahoo! Games users.[8]
- May 2005 - Yahoo! Games and Sprint partner to offer multiplayer PC-to-Mobile games. [9] Yahoo Games! expands focus on video gamers with a new site that offers player matching and more editorial content. [10]
Games
As of June 1, 2007 Yahoo! Games offers 447 titles across a range of genres from a variety of developers and publishers, including Yahoo's internally developed titles:
