Startups in general love to look for new markets where there’s a chance to make a splash quickly and loudly. Live show games—this thing didn’t appear just yesterday, but it’s only in recent years that people have been eyeing it with eagerness. It all began when traditional TV started losing ground, and mobile phones and streaming platforms became the new arena for entertainment.
Previously, interactive games were something like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” except you couldn’t actually participate. Now everything has changed. With a phone in your hand and the internet at your fingertips, you’re already live on air, answering questions, competing for prizes, and even seeing the host make mistakes right on the screen.
Industry website statistics show that live shows are on the rise. Some of them are still broadcast on television, while others have moved to online formats.
At some point, it became clear: you can gather a crowd of people in one game, add a live host, and give out prizes—all online, without a TV studio and huge expenses. For startups, this is almost a dream. The market isn’t crowded with monopolists, the entry threshold is low, and the audience is huge. Investors sensed there was not just hype, but also money to be made here. In what other field can you gather a million-strong audience in just a few months if not in live show games? Of course, there are risks. Users quickly tire of monotony, and competitors start copying successful solutions almost instantly. But those who feared risks never started startups.
Everything got mixed together: game development, streaming, show business. Technology allows you to broadcast live even from a garage—the main thing is to come up with something catchy. Interactive formats have appeared, where the viewer doesn’t just watch, but really participates, feeling like part of what’s happening. Here you get excitement, the sense of real-time, and a chance to hit the jackpot. It’s no surprise that teams from all backgrounds entered this market: from former TV hosts to IT specialists who used to develop mobile games.
Examples of Real Projects and Recent Trends
The loudest name in this industry is HQ Trivia. It seemed like just a mobile quiz where you could win real money for correct answers. But in 2017, HQ Trivia became a real phenomenon. In the evenings, up to a million people would stick to their screens, and host Scott Rogowsky became a near-global star. Veterans of Vine were behind the project, everything looked bold and fresh. Investors put in more than $15 million, and the App Store was flooded with rave reviews. However, the euphoria didn’t last long. By the summer of 2019, interest began to decline sharply, and at the beginning of 2020, HQ Trivia shut down entirely. People got tired, the prize pool shrank, and copycats like Q Live and Joyride captured part of the audience.
Against their backdrop, new attempts appeared. For example, Joyride added more social network elements to the formula—you could now not only answer questions, but also host your own mini-shows, compete with friends, and stream yourself playing. As a result, the project managed to survive the first waves of hype, although it didn’t become the next HQ Trivia. TriviaMob tried to enter the market through partnerships with TV brands, but couldn’t stay afloat for long. Surprisingly, even in Russia such shows found their audience: in 2018–2019, “Klever” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? LIVE” appeared, which quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of players, and then just as quickly lost public interest.
In recent years, it’s become clear: to keep attention, you can’t just copy quizzes. Players want more. That’s why new startups experiment with VR and AR, adding elements of augmented reality where the host appears right in your room and questions are adapted to the group of players. Some, like the British project Beat The Intro, bet on music shows instead of Q&A formats. Meanwhile, monetization is developing—now revenue comes not just from ads, but also from donations, subscriptions, and even integration with bloggers and influencers.
In the end, the live game show market turned out to be much more complex than it seemed at first. It’s easy to gather a crowd at the start, but keeping them is a different story. But it’s precisely in this field that you can see: if an idea really catches on, it can grow from an anonymous app into a cultural phenomenon in just a couple of months. Or it can fizzle out before really taking off. It all depends on how willing you are to experiment and adapt quickly along with your audience.