Yahoo to Focus on Cloud Gaming Innovation
The emergence of the cloud has allowed tech companies to reinvent themselves as a means to reconnect with clientele. Yahoo is a company that is going through a renaissance of sorts as the company has now shifted at least part of its focus into cloud gaming. It was recently announced that Yahoo has acquired Cloud Party for an undisclosed amount. Yahoo must have big plans for the Cloud Party team because Yahoo has decided to shut down their browser based game on February 21st 2014 and retain the team to work on bigger projects.
The engineers and programmers at Cloud Party are quite distinguished. Many of the Cloud Party employees have worked on other large gaming projects such as Tomb Raider, Cryptic and Pandemic with one member formerly working at Facebook. The idea of Cloud Party was to create a 3D world inside of the web browser by mainly using user generated content. This content would resemble games such as Second Life.
Yahoo and its vast gaming portal do not currently offer games such as Cloud Party. By acquiring the company, Yahoo can leverage Cloud Party as a means to stay competitive in the online browser gaming market. For decades, Yahoo has been pressing technology into their gaming platform. In the 90s, Yahoo introduced Java games for the browsers. In this decade, it seems as if Yahoo is going to take it a step further and let its users play 3D games inside of their browsers without any additional setup or local computing resources needed.
The idea of Cloud Party can be abstracted in so many different ways. Gaming analysts are excited to see what happens between the marriage of Cloud Party and Yahoo Games. Yahoo also bought PlayerScale which gives Yahoo access to hundreds of millions of online gamers. If PlayerScale and Cloud Party combine, Yahoo could be the leading force in cloud based browser delivered gaming.
