- The All-Seeing Eye
"The All-Seeing Eye", known to its community of users as "ASE", was a
game server browser designed by Finnish company UDPSoft. It helped online gamers findgame server s. "ASE" took two years to develop and was introduced as shareware onJun 15 2001 .Despite UDPSoft lacking the marketing power of
GameSpy , "ASE"'s popularity grew swiftly and steadily. It was sold toYahoo! for an undisclosed sum in September 2004.Yahoo! All-Seeing Eye
The purchase by Yahoo! was a defensive move against acquisition activity by CNet and others, and a desire on Yahoo!s part to tap into the hard-core gaming marketFact|date=June 2007. At the time of the acquisition, All-Seeing Eye had over 12M downloads, and was actively used by more than a million gamers per monthFact|date=June 2007. While some mistakenly assumed the acquisition was in some way a move against "
Xfire ", the reality is that Ultimate Arena had only rebranded themselves as XFire a couple of months prior to the ASE acquisition, and announced an impending launch of their product. Further, instant-messaging-based applications such as XFire at its launch, differed greatly from first-generation server browsing applications such as GameSpy 3D (Arcade is 2nd Generation) and All-Seeing Eye and even Rodger Wilco "TF Soldiers". Subsequently, that gap has been closed.Months later, XFire was the target of a Yahoo! lawsuit over an alleged patent infringement, partly due to the fact that Xfire's two primary developers were previously engineers on the Yahoo! Games team, where they had authored a patent (granted to Yahoo!) on messenger-based game play notification. The legal battle was resolved in January 2006 with details of the settlement remaining unknown.
"ASE"'s continued development was limited after Yahoo! acquired it, and at the time of writing there is only an unofficial forum where people can exchange hand-made updates. As a result, scanning for games developed after 2005 has become problematic, and although the application's life cycle has been extended by community-developed filters, without a major update to the program's core, "ASE" had an uncertain future. As a result, many game enthusiasts have since actively boycotted Yahoo servicesFact|date=June 2007.
In March and April 2008 Yahoo! sent emails to ASE subscribers informing them that ASE will be discontinued as of 15th May 2008 and that a $15 refund will be issued to current subscribers.
ASE has now been officially shut down, including all of their tracking servers. [http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/games/all-seeing-eye-support.html] All games that previously used the ASE service will no longer display server listing. Yahoo now redirects the ASE page to
GameSpy Arcade .External links
* [http://videogames.yahoo.com/multiplayer The All-Seeing Eye] Official Site
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