Yahoo Acquires Gaming Infrastructure Startup PlayerScale | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Acquires Gaming Infrastructure Startup PlayerScale

techcrunch.com

56 pointszher22 comments

I'm trying to find the thread that binds all of this recent M and A activity together. There have been so many acquisitions of companies big and small, wrapping your head around Yahoo's global strategy is beginning to look like Google's.

Does Yahoo have the engineering prowess to pull off this Multi-faceted hydra strategy? Do they have the management?

It seems news will play a very prominent role in the new Yahoo, but, to my knowledge, this is the first gaming acquisition in a long time.

Whatever happens, perhaps the most interesting thing is that we're talking about Yahoo again. 3-5 years ago many of us had written them off, but at least for the time being they've caught my attention.

Only common thread is both target young audiences

CEO bonus is probably tied to "increase 16-24yr old audience by 100%" and she is doing that as every other yahoo ceo would have.

As a consumer media company Yahoo needs a way to grow it's user base and increase it's reach. My guess is that many of Yahoo's existing users have been loyal to the companies core products (Mail, Finance, Portal, Homepage, etc.) and see no need to switch to the latest and greatest services, but reaching new users has been a problem.

Through acquisitions Yahoo gains valuable consumer media properties (e.g. Tumblr) and also acquires the talent needed to build new properties.

Regardless, if they kept doing "business as usual" they would still generate revenue, but slowly fade into irrelevance like AOL.

Advertising.

Imagine being being able to go to an advertiser and say "we have every important metric on the behaviours and desires of young people".

My guess is that they're not doing a multi-faceted strategy, and are doing these acquisitions to buy some expensive(but good) talent. There's a lot of bad stigma associated with yahoo, so it's possible they have a serious brain drain problem internally.

i wouldn't be surprised if this was less of a multi-market strategy and more of a play to get a games platform for tumblr. just a thought, though.

Man, they are on some buying binge. Unfortunately for them, I don't think it's possible to buy innovation or relevance. Those things have to come from within and permeate the entire culture of the firm - and Yahoo just doesn't have it right now.

Companies like Cisco seem built around buying all of their innovation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_S...

They seem to be doing well.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/indus...

The culture of Cisco M&A is unlike anything seen in Silicon Valley.

Cisco actively encourages senior engineering employees to leave the company, start new ventures and return as leaders in the M&A process. It's not fair to compare Yahoo to Cisco when Cisco invests tremendous amounts of effort, time and money into these ventures to grow and nurture them (recent example: Meraki) until they can be reabsorbed into the Mothership.

Yahoo on the other hand is buying a bunch of companies that it knows only by reputation. Yahoo might be successful, but not for the same reasons that Cisco is successful. It's just a very different culture.

Exactly - some companies can pull off this kind of acquisition. It's entirely a corporate culture thing.

It's certainly possible to buy both innovation and relevance.

Innovation is possible by acquiring already-innovative companies and letting them flourish as if you hadn't bought them, then stick your name on the work they produce.

Relevance is even easier, just throw $1.1 B and you're going to be the thing that's relevant. At least for a little while.

Is it ideal? Can it scale? Will it last? No, but it gets the job done.

If it doesn't scale that it was a waste of money.

I'm also curious for what Yahoo was going for here. Playerscale (which only product really so far is Player.io) is actually something I've worked with in the past. And it's a fairly strong idea - an easy to use but versatile server platform for multiplayer games (along with client libraries of course). The only problem was that it wasn't that well executed. Long downtimes for no explained reason, large-functionality gaps that had to be hacked around, overly simplified concepts that limit usability, large security holes, etc.

So it will be interesting to see where Yahoo goes with this.

Hey! I'd love to talk to you about your experience with Player.io (I'm building something similar). I couldn't find your email, but mine is in my profile.

I want to see where this is going and try to work out if all these acquisitions are part of the new yahoo or just some big PR stunt, though that's very unlikely yahoo has loads of money and they've caugh the attention of many. If new yahoo is going to actually do something innovative with these new products I can't wait to see what it's going to be.

Seems like Yahoo has decided cash in the bank is pointless, it's an interesting gamble to take. At the very least there's a lot of conversation surrounding Yahoo, instead of people claiming their impending death.

For a company that is in decline a lot of cash in the bank is pointless. Yahoo was in decline. So you can either have nice balance sheets while others chip away at your core business or you can spend your money either rebuilding your core or extending it.

I wouldn't put it like that; they held off on issuing dividends, and a lot of the money they're spending now is from selling half their stake in Alibaba.

Also, potentially being on TechCrunch or <insert news source> everyday may be more effective marketing, recruiting, culture building than money in the bank.

When I read this I tried searching for PlayerScale on the web. Didn't find much. Anyone have a link to their website or more info on this company?

they're most known for their main product: player.io. here's a link to that: http://playerio.com/

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