How QuizUp, the trivia app with 100 million downloads, vanished from the stores overnight

In November 2013 a small Icelandic studio shipped a trivia app. Six months later QuizUp had 20 million players and a billion games played. It would go on to pass 100 million downloads, raise more than $40 million, and sign a deal with NBC to turn it into a television show.

In 2016, Glu Mobile bought Plain Vanilla Games. The price was $7.5 million.

That is not a typo. A game with a hundred million downloads changed hands for less than a fifth of what it had raised. The whole story of QuizUp sits in the gap between those two numbers.

The audience was never the problem

This is worth saying plainly, because the opposite is the wrong lesson people usually take from it. QuizUp did not die of indifference. The product was good, people played it, and its growth was among the fastest mobile had seen at the time.

The trouble started one step later. A trivia duel lasts two minutes. There is nothing in it to sell — no item, no progression to speed up, no structural reason to spend. You cannot sell an extra life in a game where losing costs nothing and the next round starts in three seconds.

Mobile games that made money in 2013 sold time or scarcity. Trivia produces neither. What it produces is an argument with your friends, which is excellent for retention and close to unsellable.

What the ads cost

That left advertising. But a game lasts two minutes, and an ad break between rounds interrupts precisely the rhythm that makes you play another one. The format works against its own business model: the more you monetise, the less people play — and mobile trivia inventory was only ever worth a few dollars per thousand impressions anyway.

QuizUp tried to climb out by becoming a social network: profiles, topics, communities. The logic held, because the real product had always been the conversation. But turning a game into a social network means winning a second fight that other companies had already won, and the pivot did not take.

The ending, with its dates

Glu Mobile ran the game for nearly five years without giving it much. On 20 January 2021, QuizUp disappeared from the app stores. The next day, the shutdown was announced for 22 March 2021.

Three weeks after that removal, on 8 February 2021, Electronic Arts announced it was buying Glu Mobile for $2.1 billion.

The sequence has fed a common reading: that a loss-making service was switched off to tidy a balance sheet before a sale. It is plausible and it has never been confirmed, and it should be labelled that way — but the order of the dates is a matter of public record.

What it left behind

Tens of millions of people were left without the app they played. They are a specific population: they liked one precise thing — a short duel on a topic you pick — and no product has handed it back to them in the same shape since.

Thor Fridriksson, the founder, never really left the subject. He shipped Trivia Royale in 2020 and then, on 27 January 2026, Sway — presented as QuizUp’s official successor, built around live daily tournaments and city-versus-city competition. If what you miss is the ranked duel of 2014, that is the first place to look.

The lesson, if you want one

It is not “trivia doesn’t work”. It is narrower and more useful: a format can be excellent and still be incompatible with how money was made at that moment.

QuizUp was built in the years when a mobile game was expected to become a recurring-revenue service. Trivia never wanted to be that. It wants to be short, free, shared and repeated — which, a decade later, looks a great deal less like a flaw.

The games that survived the decade did not do it by working out how to sell a two-minute duel. They changed who was paying: Kahoot and Trivia Crack took opposite routes, and neither looks anything like what QuizUp was trying to do.