Yahoo announces plans to kill off Games, Livetext, Boss, and more regional sites

If you can’t sell them, kill them.

Yahoo today announced its Q1 2016 progress report, highlighting the closure of several products and regional sites. As shared in its last earnings call, the company wants to focus on just seven core consumer products: Mail, Search, Tumblr, News, Sports, Finance, and Lifestyle.

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First off, the company is shutting down its Yahoo Games site (first launched in 1998!) and publishing channel on May 13, 2016. This impacts all territories: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S.

Starting March 14, 2016, users will no longer be able to make in-game purchases on the Yahoo Games site. Yahoo says it has reached out to game publishers and asked them to develop a transition plan for players who have made in-game purchases.

Next, Yahoo Livetext is being shut down at the end of March 2016. The company launched the silent video chat app in July 2015 — we weren’t crazy about the app when we tried it out. As you might expect, Yahoo says Livetext let the company “experiment with new user experiences and features,” which it will try to incorporate into its existing products. Specifically, the company said Yahoo Messenger will have the most to gain here.

Yahoo Build your Own Search Service (BOSS) is the company’s attempt to provide an open search web services platform. The company has decided to discontinue BOSS JSON Search API and BOSS Hosted Search, as well as the BOSS Placefinder and Placespotter APIs, on March 31, 2016. Yahoo is instead recommending developers try YPA, a JavaScript solution for publishers who manage their own search engine results pages, and Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite.

Every year, it seems like Yahoo closes some of its regional sites. Once again, it is shutting down genre-specific media properties “in the coming weeks”:

• Yahoo Astrology will close in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, and India.
• Yahoo Maktoob News (Arabic and English), Celebrity, Movies, Style, Helwa, Sports, and Weather will close, and the pages will redirect to the Yahoo Maktoob homepages in Arabic and English.

Again, Yahoo says the goal is to “streamline our editorial offering” so that it can focus on just News, Sports, Finance, and Lifestyle.

At the end of 2014, Yahoo said it had closed more than 60 products and services in two years. That number has easily doubled since, as CEO Marissa Mayer tries again and again to lessen the load on the sinking ship.