Wai-Que

» see waiq.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Every night at nine, for half an hour, Yahoo! Japan ran a game show. Not a video of a game show. A live one, broadcast into a dedicated page inside the Yahoo! JAPAN app, with presenters reading ten questions to everybody watching at the same time. Trivia and riddles, plus rounds where the correct answer was whatever the majority picked. Get all ten and you shared out a prize pool of roughly 200,000 yen with every other person who also got all ten. Miss one and you stayed to watch, in a comment column that ran alongside the broadcast and that the presenters read back on air.

It started on 26 September 2018 and the official description of it, still sitting on the farewell page, called it a prize-splitting live entertainment program. Not an app, not a quiz. A program. That word is the giveaway about who inside Yahoo thought they were making it.

The prize is where this stops being portable. Winners were paid in T-Points, the loyalty currency of a Japanese convenience-store and rental-shop scheme, and later in PayPay balance once Yahoo's payment arm existed to pay them with. You could not collect unless you were inside that system, which means the entire reward structure of the show was a domestic financial product. A quiz anyone can answer, on a payment rail almost nobody outside Japan can be paid on.

~ the record ~

~ the taper ~

On 18 January 2019 the show added teams. Up to four people could play as a unit, see what the others had picked while the clock ran, and talk in a private comment thread about whether they were about to lose. If any one member answered all ten, the points were divided inside the team, so your eliminated friends still got paid off your correct answer. It is a better idea than the format it was bolted onto, and it is the only structural invention Wai-Que can claim.

Five months later the retreat started. On 27 June 2019 the account announced a regular schedule, which in practice meant the nightly show was becoming a three-night-a-week show with a fixed cast on each night. Tuesdays got a quiz club built from television regulars. Fridays got a seven-member idol group called URA-KISS, with a junior unit doing the warm-up. Going from seven nights to three is usually described as the opposite of what it is. The announcement that the show had ended came on 19 September, eleven days before the last broadcast.

~ who was actually watching ~

Yahoo never published an audience figure, which is itself informative for a company that publishes audience figures when they are good. What is on the record instead is the production: a rotating cast of television personalities and idol group members, a half-hour slot that ran nightly for the first nine months, and a prize pool paid out on every one of those nights. That is a broadcast cost structure, carried by a portal, against an audience number it declined to name.

The last broadcast, on 30 September 2019, was a fan appreciation event. Then the page at waiq.yahoo.co.jp was replaced with a farewell that was almost entirely one image, and the image was a collage of the show's own illustrations piled up over each other: a flamingo, an armadillo, a tuna, a castle, a cat sitting in a basket, an otter holding up a blackboard advertising an otter cafe. Above the pile sat a single line thanking everybody for their support. That page was still being served in March 2022. The last question had been asked thirty months earlier, and the host name stopped resolving sometime after that.

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