HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through (opens in new tab)

I 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

Nice 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

There 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.

Agreed, 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.

Words with Friends managed an actual exit (8 figures, mostly cash): https://venturebeat.com/2011/07/05/zynga-paid-53-3m-to-buy-w...

I was just thinking the same thing- HQ for me was a throwback to an era where there was a series of iPhone games that came on suddenly to the point where everyone I knew was playing constantly, and then people just kind of got bored of it.

I actually won once for something like $22, which was pretty good considering it felt like most of the time the winners got about $0.85 each.

Words with Friends is not dead I think: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/words-with-friends-2-word-game...

The best way to do that is to take sizable portions of secondary sales while raising capital at high valuations. You'll walk away with tens of millions regardless of whether the app realizes an exit in the end.

Sell your company to Zynga at the peak of your popularity is the play

> 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".

> Just like Alex Trebek is probably a big part of the reason for Jeopardy's longevity

Considering Jeopardy has spread and become immensely popular with similar longevity all over the world, I don't think that's true. It's about the format, not the host.

We also see the same thing happening with the Swedish version of HQ Trivia (called Primetime). It started out extremely popular but lost a lot of momentum fast. They haven't changed hosts so I think that what you say about shelf life is much more intrinsic to the format itself.

> 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.

Scott was a great host, but Matt and Anna are both great hosts as well. I don’t think anything will happen to Jeopardy, since it’s not a host-centered game in the first place. There are examples of shows pulling off a host switch successfully: new hosts of The Great British Bake-off aka The Great British Baking Show are actually quite better than the original team.

That 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

This is a great idea and I'd definitely invest in a vehicle that was making these types of investments.

How do you successfully co-found a massive hit while being addicted to heroin?

I 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

I 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.

If 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/ [2] https://pusher.com/

One of the founders overdosed, they switched hosts, and overall seem to have done everything in their power to tank themselves.

Well, that was both entertaining and heartbreaking. They both are great hosts.

I 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.

It's not bizarre among heroin addicts, but death by heroin overdose is a bit bizarre among cofounders of high profile companies, isn't it?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22331413.

Which is a tragedy in itself.