HQ Trivia hits 1M players milestone as app soars in popularity

Last night they hit 1M+ users, but also booted the vast majority of them from the game by marking the correct answer as incorrect on the first question. The cynical side of me wonders if it was a load shedding method.

I don't understand the appeal of doing this live. To me, one of the most valuable characteristics of the Internet is that it is asynchronous by default. You can create content, and I can view it later. That's the default state.

Even Snapchat and Instagram Stories let me watch it up to 24 hours after you publish it.

I fail to see how creating a new constraint that violates the default state of the Internet makes sense long-term.

Would love to hear the counter argument. Just musing... Perhaps at some point they will run them in different time zones? That's still not fixing the asynchronous benefit of the Internet.

To add -- DVRs proved that time-delay is an advantage, and this startup is undoing that. I'm just so curious how that gets massive scale. I've yet to see live video get real, meaningful traction and I largely believe it's because people don't want to always tune in at the same time when the alternative is far superior.

Another example -- lotto tickets. They have a live drawing, but you can buy tickets for up to a week in advance (or whatever duration).

I kind of wish HQ would go away. I know that's mean to say however it's really a rather buggy app and the game it's self is only marginally fun. Having to deal with questions not working, the host droning on, the app freezing or stream crashing makes the experience even less enjoyable. Additionally, the prize money is going to have to increase if prize is going to be more than a few $ as they keep getting bigger. Even 10k when split between a few hundred or a few thousand people gives you a pretty minimal reward. I wonder at what point the creators are going to start pivoting to advertising to start underwriting their gameshow.

I was hanging out with a group of people a couple days ago and all of a sudden 3 or 4 pulled out their phones at the same time with this giddy expression on their face [for HQ trivia].

It was pretty jarring, though not necessarily in a bad way.

Had a lot of fun playing with the whole family around the holidays. That was the first time I'd heard of the app but apparently it's been around for months and are still growing; I figured they would have peaked around New Year's.

It's getting annoying to play the game every day at 2pm/8pm central. They are still having load issues it seems, and winning typically require you to get lucky as towards the end the questions can get pretty obscure.

Wonder how long they have before they need to monetize.

I wonder what they’re going to use to mitigate cheating. But give the recent uptick in technical difficulties, they have bigger things to worry about.

I would love to know more about their software architecture... 1+ million concurrent streams is no joke! Have they published anything about it?