Article: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/14/21138408/hq-trivia-shutting-down-employee-layoffs-app-game

After one of the most meteoric rises in mobile App history, HQ Trivia is shutting down after 902 days of service. The trivia game peaked in popularity in 2018 when it hosted 2.4 million concurrent users. Unfortunately, the app was beset by a series of controversies and unfortunate tragedies. As many of you may recall, the CEO of the company in charge of HQ Trivia threatened to fire one of its hosts if The Daily Beast published an interview. Then, in 2018, one of the co-founders of HQ Trivia died of a drug overdose.

One final episode of HQ After Dark following the announcement of HQ's shuttering. This event was hosted by Matt Richards and Anna Roisman and the final prize was $5, which Matt paid for out of his own pocket. In case you missed it, the event was something truly "special."

Man, both those founders sound like asshole deuce.

The quotes in the Daily Beast article makes it sound like this Yusupov fellow was a completely unhinged monster, and Colin Kroll's past history didn't come off much better. A Fyre Festival that managed to keep appearances up for longer than it perhaps should.

I loaded up the app when I saw the notification about that final game. Sad to see it go, but I hadn't played it in several months.

That tweet pretty much sums up how it went, though also they had a giant bottle of champagne on-screen for this final broadcast. The host kinda drunkenly misspoke about them planning to open it when they hit a certain user milestone (he said three thousand, I think he meant three million, which they never quite attained). Whatever he meant to say, evidently the milestone never occurred, so they opened it on the final broadcast. I found that sad in its own way; it made me reflect on whatever peak they hit at over 2 million, to the eventual slide in user numbers as they never regained that momentum. If I may now bash the app a bit, it's kinda nuts that they didn't push harder to hold onto Scott Rogowsky, even years in their fact checking team was kinda bad and would get things wrong a lot more often than a Jeopardy, and they still routinely had audio/video sync issues which is absolutely unfathomable to me in this era of widespread use of livestreaming technology.

Now there’s that Split or Steal game to take on their spotlight

Shoutout to the dutch HQ clone that was a lot easier & made me win 20€

I interviewed for them a few months ago. In the course of the interview they mentioned that they were planning on launching about 100 new "shows" over the coming year. It sounded really crazy desperate.

-abby from brooklyn

There's another one out there if you wanna try out

Use REWARD THE FAN TRIVIA. Enter in code SFBOSSMAN for extra "lives"

Yeah part of the reason it blew up was just because of the neat concept. I remember logging in in the early days and seeing Scott and thinking "hey they should do more shit like this." It doesn't seem to have caught on as big, but it's still only 2020 perhaps in a few years we will see if HQ left any sort of lasting legacy on how things are shaped in this sphere.