The All-Seeing Eye, known to its community of users as ASE, was a

game server browser In multiplayer video games, matchmaking is the process of connecting players together for online play sessions. Playlists Playlists are automatically managed streams of online play sessions that players can join and leave at will. A set of pre ...

game server A game server (also sometimes referred to as a host) is a server (computing), server which is the authoritative source of events in a multiplayer video game. The server transmits enough data about its internal state to allow its connected Client ...

s. ASE took two years to develop and was introduced as

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

on June 15, 2001. Despite UDP Soft lacking the marketing power of

GameSpy GameSpy was an American provider of online multiplayer and matchmaking middleware for video games founded in 1996 by Mark Surfas. After the release of a multiplayer server browser for the game, QSpy, Surfas licensed the software under the GameS ...

, ASE's popularity grew swiftly and steadily. It was sold to

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

for an undisclosed sum in September 2004.

Yahoo! All-Seeing Eye

The purchase by Yahoo! was a defensive move against acquisition activity by

CNet ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...

and others, and a desire on Yahoo!'s part to tap into the hard-core gaming market. At the time of the acquisition, All-Seeing Eye had over 12M downloads, and was actively used by more than a million gamers per month. While some mistakenly assumed the acquisition was in some way a move against ''

Xfire Xfire (pronounced "X-Fire") was a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers that also served as a game server browser with various other features. It was available for Microsoft Windows. Xfire was originally developed by Ult ...

'', 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 second-generation) and All-Seeing Eye and even Roger 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 because 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 became 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 services. In March and April 2008 Yahoo! sent emails to ASE subscribers informing them that ASE will be discontinued as of 15 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. All games that previously used the ASE service will no longer display server listings. Yahoo! now redirects users seeking ASE to

GameSpy Arcade GameSpy Arcade was a shareware multiplayer game server browsing utility. GameSpy Arcade allowed players to view and connect to available multiplayer games, and chat with other users of the service. It was initially released by GameSpy Industries ...

, which has since been shut down also.

References

External links

The All-Seeing Eye former official site
(archive)

(archive) * ttps://web.archive.org/web/20071016134741/http://ase.staticservers.com/smf Old forum(archive) 2001 software Discontinued Yahoo! services Game server browsers Internet Protocol based network software Yahoo! acquisitions {{videogame-culture-stub