October 16, 2015 Update: If you’re running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), you’ll need to disable the System Integrity Protection functionality if you want to hide or remove Game Center.
One of the first things I noticed when looking around OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) was the Game Center icon in the Applications folder.
Game Center has been in Mac OS X since 10.8 (Mountain Lion), but the icon recently changed to match the bubbly iOS icon:

I never really use Game Center on iOS and am always annoyed with the spammy friend requests. I’ve turned off Game Center friend requests multiple times, but it always seems to get turned back on.
Once I saw Game Center in Yosemite, I immediately tried to drag the icon to the Trash. No luck:

It took a couple minutes, but I figured out how to remove it. Here’s how your remove Game Center:
Warning! Don’t do this unless you’re comfortable with the command line and have a recent backup of your hard drive. If you don’t know what sudo
means, then please don’t proceed. A simple mistake with sudo rm
could cause major issues.
– Open Terminal
– Navigate to the Applications folder
– Enter the following:
sudo rm -rf "Game Center.app"
That’s it!
After removing Game Center, I restarted my computer. Game Center didn’t reappear and everything is seems fine. So far. There are probably some ramifications if you try to play Mac App Store games that support Game Center, but I’m not sure. And now I’m wondering if Game Center will reappear then next time I update OS X. Regardless, it’s nice to be rid of that extraneous icon 🙂
Otherwise, I really like Yosemite. It’s really snappy (on a wiped 2012 MacBook Air).