Trivia Games

Any market for these type of games?

E.g. a 'Who wants to be a millionaire' style title, 4 possible answers, general knowledge questions.

I noticed there's not many such titles, let alone high ranking ones, on sites like bigfishgames.com

The commercial ones struggled to have enough questions for constant play so fizzled out.
Bit off-topic. Years ago I met a bloke in London who played Pub Quiz machines for a living. Started in his lunchbreak and learnt all the questions from a couple of the machines. When all day opening started he quit his job and just travelled from pub to pub (he had a set route which didn't take him to the same pubs too often) which he knew had machines he had the answers to. At the time he was on £150 (GBP) a day but had to reinvest in learning new machines.

I'm a firm believer that there's a market for any type of game you could possibly make. The question is whether you can find it and sell to it. If you like the marketing side and you enjoy the work of selling, then this is probably as good a genre as any. If you want to write a game, chuck it on the portals and start writing something else while you wait for the money to come in, then probably not.

My trivia game does ok, but only with a lot of work ( and a bit of money thrown at it ) to actually get it out there. It never seems to do much on the portals and my guess is that you would see a lot of TV tie-ins on the portals if trivia games did well on the portals in general. Weakest Link, Millionaire, these sort of licenses would go down well if the market was there. There indeed are a couple of them. Jeopardy has been around for a while and another American one whose name escapes me at the moment. I don't have their sales figures but they never seem to trouble any top ten lists so unless they've been extraordinarily slow burners, I doubt they did much business on the portals.

Probably straining your brain with a bunch of trivia questions doesn't count as casual or relaxing for most people. But yeah, if you've got a plan on who you're going to sell it to and how to market to them, I'm sure it could do very well. Also, since the portals haven't been inundated with TV tie-ins, you might well find yourself in a position to get a license. Millionaire and Weakest Link have been done in retail, so the licenses are probably not available, but there's a new crappy quiz on tv every week, so I'm sure with a decent programmer and a decent artist you'd have a good chance of getting a license for Golden Balls or Eggheads or some such. If you wanted it, and if it fit with your marketing plan, that is.

Trivial Pursuits has also been done.

I think I'll avoid. Just curious, as it seems like the sort of genre that could do really well.

Cheers for the feedback Gab.

Caff, I'm currently trying to refine or come up with some new gameplay. Man it is HARD to be original these days. Most are just cloning with a new theme or cosmetics. I struggle daily to get blood out of the stone. Maybe soon I'll have my eureka.

As far as trivia goes. I like that MST3K stuff. A trivia game about old sci-fi movies would be cool. But I'm a sci-fi buff in my own mind. (NOT Star Trek ewww).

I think part of the problem might be that trivia games are not interactive and don't really need many props. The computer doesn't really have much of a part to play other than to dish out some questions, and most of the interaction is social. You can't really emulate a `trivia night` where usually everything is about people talking to each other and almost nothing about interacting with the questioner. Unlike movies a trivia game is very active but it's just not interactive. You either know stuff or you don't and there is almost nothing to learn so the game can't really keep things hidden from you to create a need for discovery.

"You Don't Know Jack" was a brilliant trivia game back in the late 90's. Shame they didn't continue with it, particularly onto consoles.

I've just been playing an online version of it today, it's GREAT.

Cor blimey didn't realise there was an online version... well that's my weekend gone then :)

yep, it's really good and highly addictive. Funny you should mention it today when I was just checking it out, might give you a clue about what sort of game I'm considering next...