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HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through
- zacksinclair 7y agoWhat a quick ride. It was so popular, so quickly. There must not have been great retention? Or poor monetization?
- kick 7y agoOne of the founders overdosed, they switched hosts, and overall seem to have done everything in their power to tank themselves.
- dickjocke 7y agoDo....do you think they murdered Colin Kroll?
- kick 7y agoNo? I don't think the comment implied that; I separated the two between an "and" for a reason. I was just stating that that was when things seemed to start going down for them.
- stordoff 7y agoI think it's clear that it's not the intended meaning, but I can see how it might be misread as that. "and overall seem to have done everything in their power" did make me wonder for a brief second if the first two things were examples of things in their power. Personally, I'd probably tweak it to something like "and overall seem" to make the distinction more clear.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- miguelmota 7y agoHQ Trivia was great at first but it got boring fast, especially when they replaced host Scott Rogowsky and did the show multiple times a day instead of every few days which created more hype. The sudden death of cofounder Colin Kroll was also a bizarre event to add to the mix.
- TaylorGood 7y agoThere was a hot three weeks where I was all about it, and told anyone around me to watch or download it. Your points, along with primarily never making it past the third or fourth question was why I stopped. Was easy to forget about.
- edwhitesell 7y agoAgreed, I played a bit a year or two ago, won a few games and enjoyed it. I was actually happier when Scott hosted less, but I'm in a minority there among people I know. Ultimately, there was nothing very "sticky" about it for me. The "once a day" thing is kinda fun, but when there's nothing else to use the App for the other 23 hours of the day, it's easy to break the habit and forget about it.
- cletus 7y agoThis should be surprising to precisely no one. And this is nothing against HQ Trivia (although the founder seemed like a tool [1]) but any sort of format has a shelf life. Long-lasting shows like Jeopardy are outliers. The more typical case is where a given show will play for a few years, people will get bored with it and it'll be replaced by something else. That's really all that happened here. HQ Trivia had a novelty value that eventually went away. Losing Scott probably didn't help. Just like Alex Trebek is probably a big part of the reason for Jeopardy's longevity, I think Scott was a big part of the reason for HQ Trivia's popularity. [1]: https://theoutline.com/post/2517/is-hq-trivia-holding-its-host-hostage?zd=1&zi=iduliajj https://theoutline.com/post/2517/is-hq-trivia-holding-its-ho...
- jedberg 7y ago> Just like Alex Trebek is probably a big part of the reason for Jeopardy's longevity Off topic, but I do wonder what will happen to their ratings when he retires in the next few years. The Price is Right pulled it off, their ratings are apparently higher now than they had been, since they started putting clips on YouTube and other types of "millennial marketing".
- not2b 7y agoTrebek had a strong vision of what the show should be that would be at odds with what most studio execs might prefer. When he's gone, there will be pressure to dumb it down, make the questions easier and more trendy, make it more flashy. If they do that it will no longer be special and will wither away.
- jedberg 7y ago> there will be pressure to dumb it down, make the questions easier and more trendy, make it more flashy. You could see this already in their recent GOAT primetime special. Someone did the numbers, it was like 12% of the questions were about Disney properties.
- 7y ago
- HaloZero 7y agoIt almost sounds like a Game of Thrones esque style episode of Silicon Valley. Huge success. Co-founder dies. There was a mutiny to remove the CEO from it's employees Layoffs and now shutdown. This happened all within about a year? (Cofounder passed in December 2018)
- MuffinFlavored 7y agoHow do you successfully co-found a massive hit while being addicted to heroin?
- zweep 7y agoIt's called high-functioning addiction and there are tens of millions of such people (mostly addicted to alcohol).
- unlinked_dll 7y agoOr benzodiazepines and prescription painkillers. People switch to heroin when they run out of money.
- th0ma5 7y agoI had heard high functioning is a misnomer. They may have one area of focus they can succeed under some definition, but the overall quality of life and relationships is very poor.
- th0ma5 7y agoMust be the alcoholics hitting the down arrow :P Here is a great article https://www.nytimes.com./2009/05/05/health/05brod.html https://www.nytimes.com./2009/05/05/health/05brod.html ...
- Marsymars 7y agoMy understanding was that "high functioning" is relative to what is essentially "non functioning", where the person is unable to keep up even the semblance of a normal life.
- veemjeem 7y agoI'm sure death among heroin addicts is common. It's only a matter of time they'll come in contact with a fentanyl laced dose.
- StavrosK 7y agoWhich is a tragedy in itself.
- johnpowell 7y agoI had a few friends die from heroin overdoses and that was 25+ years ago. Fentanyl exacerbates the issue but is is easy enough to O.D. without it.
- robbrown451 7y agoIt's not bizarre among heroin addicts, but death by heroin overdose is a bit bizarre among cofounders of high profile companies, isn't it?
- unlinked_dll 7y agoI'd guess they usually have access to better drugs. Addiction affects people from all walks of life, and people who can afford their addiction don't necessarily have it impact their work.
- johnpowell 7y ago
- DevX101 7y agoAny write-up on their tech stack? I imagine it's not an easy problem at the height of their popularity to scale so many live video feeds with real-time interactions.
- webo 7y agoI did a little bit of exploring a few years ago [0]. Iirc they just had one live stream for all their shows. All app events (quiz, chat messages) were through websocket. The founders are ex-Vine founders, who then created a live streaming app called Hype. It looked like they were re-using Hype in HQ according to some URLs like hype.space. https://github.com/Bekt/hqmania-ai/blob/master/lib/client.js https://github.com/Bekt/hqmania-ai/blob/master/lib/client.js
- untog 7y agoIf you have money (and they did) it’s actually not too difficult to solve. There are services out there to scale both video streaming[1] and websockets[2] for you. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ [2] https://pusher.com/ https://pusher.com/
- dep_b 7y agoUltra low latency that allows real-time interaction is really hard to scale. I have built an HQ clone and the only right way in terms of latency seemed using WebRTC.
- roland-s 7y agoI found a job posting of theirs a while back while trying to figure out their tech stack. It required experience in docker, redis, node, can't remember what else if anything. Given the on demand nature of the game you can kind of imagine the kind of microservice architecture built from those components. For example each container handles X number of users, redis cache has a copy of game state/user state, each round questions/answers are handled and losers are kicked out so load is progressively reduced through the course of a game until only a winner remains. Most likely cloud was used to spin up containers right before trivia starts so you only pay for compute while a game is in progress then spin everything down.
- stirlo 7y agoSame thing happened to Draw Something and Words with Friends. The trick is to get the 9 figure valuation, raise as much funding as possible and then put as much in your pockets before the hype dies down.
- charlesju 7y agoWords with Friends is not dead I think: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/words-with-friends-2-word-game/id1196764367 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/words-with-friends-2-word-game...
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoLast time I tried it it was so cluttered with ads I had to often force close it to get it to work. Total rubbish.
- kenneth 7y agoSell your company to Zynga at the peak of your popularity is the play
- benzible 7y agoWords with Friends managed an actual exit (8 figures, mostly cash): https://venturebeat.com/2011/07/05/zynga-paid-53-3m-to-buy-words-with-friends-mobile-game-maker-newtoy/ https://venturebeat.com/2011/07/05/zynga-paid-53-3m-to-buy-w...
- 1zael 7y agoThis always happens with products built to focus on short-term engagement instead of driving long-term retention.
- freepor 7y agoSome of these consumer startups should be financed and built like a movie, not a company. Use off the shelf tooling, experienced staff, and expect the thing to die off in revenues over a couple of years with some residual revenues in maintenance mode.
- fyfy18 7y agoThat doesn't really fit into the SV narrative of unicorns though :/ There was an article last week about new forms of funding that may make supporting this model more common: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22275550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22275550
- rhlsthrm 7y agoThis is a great idea and I'd definitely invest in a vehicle that was making these types of investments.
- dorchadas 7y agoCount me as one of those who slowly quit playing when Scott quit hosting. He was definitely part of the reason I tuned in to play last year for a few months. And the fact that it was nightly, and not many games seeming to happen all the time.
- throw7 7y agoI don't know... when I first heard about it, it was iPhone only? I believe, and, honestly, I'm not the type to just install just any "app" on my cell phone. So, for me, the interest or "hype" was doa.
- pid_0 7y agoWow totally forgot about HQ... kind of obvious why it shut down because so did everyone else.
- perseusprime11 7y agofounders could have made money if they accepted that it was a fad.
- pascoej 7y agoHQ was a daily part of my life for a few months in my last year of college. It was pretty cool way to get a large group of friends together twice a day. Building software to assist in answering questions and win was fun too ;)
- _bxg1 7y agoIt was a neat idea. I'd be interested to see what else people could come up with around live events you participate in via your phone. Obviously there's generic video streaming, but the more specific something gets the more interesting the cultural impact. Remember Twitch Plays Pokémon?
- vl 7y agoMATT AND ANNA ARE DOING FINAL BROADCAST RIGHT NOW!
- vl 7y agoWell, that was both entertaining and heartbreaking. They both are great hosts.
- dep_b 7y agoI still believe interactivity like this is the future of TV, but the real killer app hasn’t been found yet.
- ficklepickle 7y agoShameless plug for my new open source trivia PWA Just Trivia[0] It has no ads, tracking, social integrations or monetization of any kind. It can never go out of business, it already is out of business! It's an MVP, I just stood it up two days ago. The whole app bundle is around 700k before splitting. Each 10 question uses about 7kb of additional data. No CSS frameworks, minimal 3rd party deps. Uses the awesome illustrations from undraw.co I'm working on an offline mode, with the db cached and the service worker acting as back end. Sorry that got long. I'm going to do a show HN soon. But check it out if you want a simple trivia game on phone or tablet. It's a passion project, in case you can't tell. [0] https://justtrivia.fun https://justtrivia.fun Repos: Front github.com/jeremy21212121/trivia-frontend Back github.com/jeremy21212121/express-trivia-server
- yoyifo5059 7y agoNice that you put together a great MVP and get-things-done Anyone here interesting in doing a decent front-end to a simple card game e.g. UNO or war or whatever? I will do the backend APIs. I can spare a few $xxx. Hit me up on yoyifo5059@mailboxt.net
- bruceb 7y agoI tried it. Its clean. One thing, after completing one category, computers, I tried clicking on others and nothing happend. Even after refreshing page. This was on firefox
- ficklepickle 7y agoThanks for trying it! Strange, I can't replicate that. After a game, it should return you to categories with your category/categories still selected. Pressing next should start a game of the same category. I'll dig into the server logs and see if I can figure it out. If you feel like it you can open a github issue.
- jkaljundi 7y agoWhat are the best trivia apps nowadays? Have been looking but haven't found anything great. Still feels like there is an unmet need. I still love Quizup though ...