The All-Seeing Eye

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This article is about a software application. For other uses, see All-seeing eye (disambiguation).

The All-Seeing Eye, known to its community of users as ASE, is a game server browser designed by Finnish company UDPSoft. It helps online gamers find game servers. ASE took two years to develop and was introduced as shareware on Jun 15, 2001.

Despite UDPSoft lacking the marketing power of GameSpy, ASE's popularity grew swiftly and steadily. It was sold to Yahoo! for an undisclosed sum in September 2004.

[edit] 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 market. At the time of the acquisition, All-Seeing Eye had over 12MM 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, 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 Arcade and All-Seeing Eye. 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 has an uncertain future. As a result, many game enthusiasts have since actively boycotted Yahoo services.

[edit] Alternatives

Many former users of ASE have changed to different products meanwhile.

HLSW, focuses on game server browser and administration but also allows for messengering functionality and has possibly one of the largest game support lists.
GameSpy Arcade, which uses a heavily chatroom centric approach with added game browser functionality.
Qtracker, which actually predates ASE, has a very similar feel to ASE.
XFire, which comes as a messenger with added game browser functionality.