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HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

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Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#51
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trebek 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.

Man, a dumbed down Jeopardy with trendy questions would be so depressing. My hope is that they hire Ken Jennings and he carries on the tradition fully in honor of Trebek.

There were a couple answers about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory during GOAT Jeopardy, which made me hopeful that they were going to offer the host job to the winner, as Wonka did.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#52
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? 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.

I 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]

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#53
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's just unbelievable. Digital copy of a decades-old game is worth $50M because of its app store rating.

Let's not fail to mention the millions of people that opened the app 50x per day and were shown 25 ads each time.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#54
post #10

Any 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.

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/

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#55
post #39
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Off topic, but I do wonder what will happen to their ratings when he retires in the next few years. OT and somewhat sad but that... won't happen. He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year. I'm not sure on his exact prognosis of course but... it seems more likely than not that he won't see 2021 (Fs in the chat).

Perhaps. He said in October he was in remission, in December it was back, but they are trying some new experimental treatments. So maybe this will be one of those cases where everyone is happy about rich people having better medical outcomes.

Wasn't it Jobs who had a "rare form" of pancreatic cancer that was in a way more treatable than usual, leading to him living many more years?

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#57
post #11

Same 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.

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.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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.

Heroin is very good. I'm having a hard time coming up with something better that could be used for prolonged periods of time as efficiently. Cocaine is great, not as great as heroin and cocaine has some drawbacks (sniff). Like everyone knows you are on it. And you can only snort so much before you get nose bleeds. And I have been that guy where my right nostril starts pouring out blood so I snort with my left. Heroin…

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing that.

Closest I've gotten was Valium given by my oral surgeon as part of some tooth extraction. Wow, Valium is great. I would eat it every day if I had access to it. As a result, I stay totally away from everything. I have back problems that qualify me for opioids, but based on my Valium experience, there's no way I wouldn't go all in. So I manage the pain other ways, exercises, posture, and just gritting my teeth and dealing with the pain.

I had a friend that made homemade Laudanum for helping with cancer pain. Maybe I would do Laudanum if I had that problem and made it myself.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#60
post #11

Same 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.

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

Draw Something was a 9 figure exit (183 million). Also to Zynga.
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