Why these two trivia games are still here, in the decade that killed QuizUp and HQ Trivia

The 2013–2021 decade is easy to tell as a graveyard: QuizUp launched in 2013 and closed in 2021, HQ Trivia launched in 2017 and dissolved in 2020.

Except that two trivia games born in exactly the same window are still here, and not quietly. Kahoot was bought for $1.7 billion in July 2023. Trivia Crack, released in October 2013 — a month before QuizUp — has passed 800 million downloads.

They have nothing in common except the thing that matters.

Kahoot: stop being a game

Kahoot did not win by working out how to monetise players. It changed who the customer was.

The product is a quiz on a shared screen that everyone answers from their phone. It was born for the classroom and it stayed there: the person who makes the quiz is not the person playing it. The teacher, the trainer, the team lead — that is the customer. The thirty people answering pay nothing and were never meant to.

That one move dissolves the problem that killed QuizUp. You do not sell a two-minute duel to a player; you sell a work tool to an institution, on an annual subscription, out of a budget that already exists, to a buyer who renews without thinking about it.

The exit price says the rest. In July 2023 a consortium led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management — with General Atlantic, KIRKBI (the LEGO family’s investment vehicle) and Glitrafjord, controlled by Kahoot’s own chief executive — took the Oslo-listed company private for NOK 17.2 billion, about $1.72 billion, a 53.1% premium to the closing price.

The cost of that choice is real: Kahoot is not quite a game any more. It is education and enterprise software wearing the shape of a quiz. Nobody plays it on a Saturday night.

Trivia Crack: stay a game, but free and everywhere

Etermax, an Argentine studio, went the opposite way. Preguntados shipped in October 2013 in Spanish before becoming Trivia Crack, and it stayed what it was: a mass-market free game funded by advertising and in-app purchases.

Two things carried it where the others were not looking.

Language and territory. It was born in Spanish, for Latin America, in a market American studios were ignoring. It has been the number one trivia game in 125 countries and is available in more than 180.

Turn-based play. Unlike a real-time duel, a game of Trivia Crack does not require both players to be present at once. You take your turn, they take theirs three hours later. It sounds minor; it is decisive. A real-time game needs a critical mass of players connected in the same instant or it feels empty — that is the constraint that makes mobile trivia fragile the moment growth slows. Turn-based play does not have it. Two friends are enough.

The format also has a wheel and characters to collect, which is to say it finally had something to sell. Etermax has passed 800 million downloads across its games.

What the two share

One thing, and it is structural: neither depends on an audience being present at the same moment.

Kahoot works because one teacher decides and thirty people follow. Trivia Crack works because a turn can wait. QuizUp and HQ Trivia both needed a lot of people to be there simultaneously — one to find you an opponent at your level, the other to fill a nightly appointment.

A simultaneous audience is the most expensive kind to maintain and the first to leave. When it thins, the product does not degrade gently — it stops working. A duel with no opponent is not a slightly worse duel. It is a loading screen.

What that says about the format

Nothing bad, in fact. Trivia is one of the few game formats anyone can play with no explanation, at any age, in any language.

What the decade showed is that trivia is an excellent activity and a poor industry — as soon as it is asked to be a permanent, monetisable audience.

Which may be why it is doing so well in the places where nobody is trying to make an industry of it: in bars, living rooms and group chats, where a quiz never needed an app to exist.