HQ Words

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

~ the obituary ~

hq words was the second game pushed inside the hq trivia app, the live-mobile-quiz phenomenon from rus yusupov and colin kroll that had peaked in march 2018 with 2.38 million concurrent players for a single game and had been slowly bleeding viewers ever since. the words spinoff was the team's attempt to spread risk across a second game type. instead of trivia questions on a video stream hosted by scott rogowsky, hq words gave you a partly-revealed sentence and asked you to fill in letters in a sequence that paid off if you finished the full puzzle. the format borrowed openly from wheel of fortune. the host most of the time was anna roisman, the rotating co-host who had filled in on trivia. the prize pools were smaller than trivia's, usually one thousand to ten thousand dollars per night.

the launch in december 2018 happened in the worst possible week. colin kroll, who had been chief operating officer and then ceo after yusupov, was found dead in his manhattan apartment on december 16, 2018. cause of death was an accidental drug overdose. kroll was 35 and a known difficult-personality figure inside the company, but he had also been the engineering brain holding the app's infrastructure together. hq words launched a few days later because the schedule had already been set. yusupov hosted the first game himself.

the spinoff bought the parent app some time. hq words ran twice a week through 2019, attracting smaller concurrent audiences than peak trivia but still real numbers, in the low six figures. some players preferred it to the main trivia game because the format was less punishing, you could lose a guess and stay in. the company tried other expansions in 2019, including hq sports and hq tunes, none of which caught. revenue did not catch up to the cost of running a live show six nights a week with a host roster and a real prize pool.

on february 14, 2020, after a sale to a tencent-backed acquirer fell through that week, yusupov sent a memo telling staff the company would cease operations and move to dissolution. all 25 employees were laid off the same day. hq trivia and hq words both stopped airing immediately. yusupov then announced four days later that a tentative deal was in place with a different buyer. the company resumed daily games on march 29, 2020 and limped on through 2021 and 2022. the apps stopped airing new games entirely in november 2022 and were removed from the app stores in august 2023. for hq words specifically the original cultural moment ended on the february 14 layoff day.

i never played hq trivia or hq words. the live game had to run at 9 pm eastern, which is 5 am ankara time, and the prize pool was in dollars to a us bank account. the game was structurally not playable from turkey on the original schedule. i learned about hq trivia from tech press during its 2018 peak and recognized the format from its later imitators on regional networks. hq words was even more strictly a us product than the parent app and never reached enough recognition outside the us for me to have heard the spinoff's name during its actual lifespan.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

hq trivia had already been declining for nine months by the time words launched. the daily concurrent audience was down from a peak of more than two million to something closer to a hundred thousand on a good night. the team needed a way to refresh the format and pull viewers back. words was the answer. the wheel-of-fortune-meets-mobile-live mechanic was different enough from trivia to give people a reason to open the app for a second show per week. the production quality was lower than the trivia broadcasts and the prize pools were smaller, but the engineering work to support live audience input on a different game type was real. for a couple of months in early 2019 hq words felt like a viable second product.

~ the day it died ~

february 14, 2020 was the day. yusupov had been trying to sell the company through the second half of 2019. multiple acquirers showed interest and dropped out. the final talks with a tencent-backed buyer fell apart in the first half of february, and once that deal died there was no runway left. the staff got the layoff news in person at the office. the apps stopped pushing notifications that evening. the press cycle that followed was small but pointed. tech reporters who had been the loudest cheerleaders for hq's 2017 and 2018 rise wrote the obituary the same week as the layoff. hq trivia became the standard shorthand example for an app that became a cultural moment without ever building a business.

~ the long tail ~

the partial revival under a new owner from march 2020 onward kept the hq brand alive in zombie form for about thirty months. games ran erratically and the host roster rotated. prize pools shrank. by mid 2022 the brand was effectively gone even though the apps still launched. hq words was the first of the games to disappear from the schedule, partly because the live-host overhead for a small viewer base did not pencil out, partly because nostalgic players were specifically there for the original trivia format. the apps came off the app stores on august 5, 2023. by then hq words had been functionally extinct for over a year.

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