HQ Trivia

HQ Trivia was a quiz format game show application released in 2017 initially for iOS, and Android just after Christmas that same year, that bragged about offering real world monetary prizes that users could then cash out with with a PayPal account. Although its general trivia show was its bread and butter, it also had other variants also hosted in the same application that either specialized in specific subject matter or had a different format, such as HQ Sports, HQ Words, HQ Tunes, and HQX.
In its prime, it pulled in approximately 2 million viewers every night, but dwindled down to about 50,000 by its demise. It was founded by two of the the same three people that also founded Vine, the late Colin Kroll, and Rus "Don’t sell your company!" Yusupov.https://twitter.com/rus/status/791681274339622913
== Shutdown ==
Speculation and fears of a shutdown ramped up progressively with time as things like Scott Rogowsky's sacking and a failed internal coup d'etat against Rus as a resulthttps://techcrunch.com/2019/04/12/hq-trivia-new-host/https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/14/trivia-game-of-thrones/, the axing of an afternoon (2 PM ET) game, axing of regional (UK) variants, dwindling prize pools and then users and then prizes and then users (and so on), the disappearance of sponsored shows, a lack of celebrity guest hosts, as well as other events took place one by one.
On February 14, 2020, Rus delivered HQ's employees and its users a Valentine's Day gift of an immediate shutdown,https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/14/media/hq-trivia-shut-down/index.html after apparent talks of an acquisition by an interested buyer that were allegedly close to closing ultimately did not go through, and investors pulled out life support. This was then confirmed to the general public in the form of a push notification that said the following: "HQ is live. Just kidding. We're off-air indefinitely. HQties, it's been a blast. Thanks for playing."
A final send-off game in the "After Dark" format was held later that night. Not long afterwards, @hqtrivia's description was changed to "BRB". This is unlikely to result in anything meaningful for the future of the app and company, however.
App infrastructure remained up as of early morning on February 16th. In the hours before the final game and after the notification, cashouts were still possible to be requested, but there haven't been any reports of users receiving any funds in their PayPal accounts from requests generated during this time.
== Temporary revival ==
Because of the early 2020 virus outbreak, HQ Trivia was revived on March 30th in part due to an "anonymous investor" providing money to continue operations.https://www.cnet.com/news/hq-trivia-returns-after-february-shutdown/ Games since its revival have also made charitable donations to a variety of organizations. The only games that have run on a regular basis are standard HQ Trivia games; HQ Sports, Words, and other modes no longer run regularly are only run infrequently on special occasions. It is not known how deep the supposed investor's pockets are, and it's always possible that after the virus situation passes that it may shut down once more.
There have been no HQ games held since November 2022.
== Archival ==
Because of its live-streamed nature, retroactive archival is effectively impossible without some means of time travel. Many 3rd party archives exist but are incomplete and cover different periods of the show's history. Many also leave out the countdown sequence (before it was extended to 5 minutes) or the pre-countdown sequence which might not be important to you, but might be to someone else.
Non-video archives that track game content and statistics also exist such as HQ Buff, which serve a similar role to sites like J! Archive for Jeopardy.
Todo: generate a list of each game that was scheduled (HQ Buff would be a good starting point), and track down whatever captures of those games exist and haven't succumbed to Content IDings/channel closures/etc.
Android application versions, up to and including its post-Christmas 2017 beta versions, are preserved at APKMirror: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/intermedia-labs/hq-trivia-words/
== References ==