QuizUp

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

~ the eulogy ~

QuizUp's entire life happened on a phone. My internet habits were set on a desktop with a modem behind it, and the app store gold rush of 2013 was something i read about rather than joined. This one i watched from outside the window.

It came out of Reykjavik. Plain Vanilla Games put it on iOS on 7 November 2013, run by a chief executive named Thor Fridriksson, and the format was as plain as the studio name. You were matched against a stranger, you both got seven timed multiple choice questions on a topic you had picked, and whoever was right more often and faster took the match.

The topic list was the actual product. There were more than 1,200 of them and the questions inside were written by volunteers, which meant the app covered things no trivia publisher would ever have paid an editor to cover. Twenty million people had signed up by May 2014. A billion matches had already been played across 197 countries two months before that.

What i can say honestly is that i knew the name without ever installing it. That is its own kind of reach and it is the kind that does not pay rent. The app was free and the questions were donated. The money was supposed to arrive later, from somewhere other than the game.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Android followed on 6 March 2014 and Windows Phone on 18 June 2015, by which point Plain Vanilla had taken more than $26 million in venture funding on the back of numbers that looked unarguable. The company told reporters its players averaged forty minutes a day, which for a free app with no story and no characters was the sort of figure that made investors sit forward.

The reason it worked was that it had no lobby and no waiting. You opened it, picked a subject, and were in a match against somebody in another country within a few seconds. Trivia had always been a thing you did at a table with people you already knew. This turned it into something you did alone at a bus stop against a stranger who was also alone at a bus stop.

~ the unraveling ~

On 30 September 2015 Plain Vanilla announced a deal with Universal Television for a ten episode game show on NBC, and five days later ITV bought the rights to a British version. Production started. The first episode was scheduled for 5 March 2017. This was the plan the whole company was now built around, because eighty million players who paid nothing were an expense and a television format was the thing that would turn them into revenue.

NBC scuttled the show in August 2016. On 31 August the Reykjavik office closed and all thirty six employees were let go. Revenue had been climbing, but the cost of keeping that many players connected climbed faster, and the one plan for closing the gap had just been canceled by somebody else.

~ the day it died ~

Glu Mobile bought the app in December 2016 in a deal valued at $7.5 million, debt forgiveness included. For a product that had raised $26 million and reached most of the countries on earth, that is close to a salvage price. Glu kept the servers running for four more years without doing much with them, which is what usually happens to an acquired app that nobody at the acquirer particularly wanted.

It was pulled from the App Store on 20 January 2021. The next day a notice inside the app said the game would be discontinued on 22 March. The servers actually held on until 24 March, a couple of days and several hours past the announced time, and then quizup.com stopped answering. Eighty million accounts, more than a thousand volunteer-written topics, and a billion finished matches went off at once with no way to export any of it.

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