HQ Trivia

» see hqtrivia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

hq trivia was an iphone app that ran a live trivia show twice a day. you opened it at 9pm eastern, scott rogowsky started reading multiple-choice questions, and you had ten seconds per answer. survive twelve in a row and you split a cash prize with the other survivors. miss one and you were out, watching the rest of the show as a ghost.

the app was a us phenomenon of late 2017 through early 2018. peak was 2.38 million concurrent players on march 28, 2018, which is the kind of number a tv network would kill for and a venture-backed app cannot sustain. behind the scenes the show ran on a stack the company could not afford, with aws bills nobody had a good plan to pay and a host who was really a stand-up comedian moonlighting as a daily anchor.

i missed hq trivia by every dimension that matters. 9pm eastern is 4am in ankara, and the prize paid out in dollars into us bank accounts you needed a us address to open. by 2018 i was a working engineer on edge ai work, not somebody who set an alarm for a phone gameshow. the first time i heard of hq was a verge writeup about scott rogowsky leaving, after the run was already over.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

rus yusupov and colin kroll built hq trivia inside intermedia labs. both of them had previously co-founded vine, the six-second video app that twitter bought and then killed. hq launched on ios on august 26, 2017. android shipped at the end of december. the prize started at $250 a night and climbed past $10,000 within months.

scott rogowsky was the host who turned the show into a thing. he had a bit, a stage name, "quiz daddy." he worked the eleven-minute format like a daytime tv anchor who knew that nobody else on the internet was doing live broadcasting at this scale. for about six months in early 2018 you could not look at twitter at 9pm without somebody quote-tweeting an hq question.

~ the unraveling ~

the format had no second move. once you had played a hundred shows, the questions got familiar, the prize was unimpressive split a thousand ways, and the streaming infrastructure could not keep up with the times the company most needed it to. payouts took weeks. lag spikes during finals turned into refund threads. by mid-2019 the average game was down to around 200,000 players, which is a great audience and a terrible runway.

colin kroll died of a drug overdose in december 2018. the company spent the first half of 2019 trying to raise money against board concerns about workplace culture and against a market that no longer wanted live-trivia apps. scott rogowsky was replaced as primary host in april 2019, after which the show stopped feeling like the show.

~ the actual end ~

on february 14, 2020 the staff was told the company had run out of cash and operations were ending. the founders attempted a sale to a streaming firm that fell through the same week. employees were laid off without severance. the app sat dark for six weeks, came back briefly under a smaller team in march 2020, and limped along into 2022 before quietly leaving the app stores in august 2023.

what hq trivia proved is that you can build a tv-network audience on a phone in six months and lose it just as fast. the format is not protected by anything except the host you cannot afford to keep and the novelty you cannot replicate. the next live-event app that worked at this scale was a video game ceremony. nobody has rebuilt the gameshow since.

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