Loco to Trivia: Who will win the battle to be India's top quiz app

A slew of online games such as BrainBaazi, Loco and Trivia Live are bringing the joys of quizzing to your mobile phone

India loves quiz shows. You only have to look at the phenomenal success of Kaun Banega Crorepati, a show hosted by Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, to be convinced of that fact. In another era, legions of school kids sat glued to the hugely popular Bournvita Quiz Contest, which used to air on the radio before it reinvented itself for television. And now, in this age of the internet, a bunch of startups and app companies are bringing the joys of quizzing to Indians on their mobile phones.

BrainBaazi, Loco, Qureka Quiz, IQ Live and Trivia Live are just some of the apps that you can dip into if you feel like engaging in a spot of quizzing. Their USP? Unlike quiz shows on television, where you are more of a spectator, you can be an active participant in these shows. This is made possible by a combination of innovative game-play, faster mobile internet speeds, live stream technology and digital payment integrations. 

Another big draw of these online brain-teasers is that they promise real cash rewards if you win. With PayTm integrated across all such platforms, the rewards are transferred to the users’ digital wallets.

Here’s how it works. A live quiz is beamed on the app at a set time of the day; a show host on live video talks to the audience and asks questions; the questions as well as the answer options appear over the video as text; the user has to click on the correct option; if correct, the next question is presented and so it goes on, till a wrong answer is selected. If the user answers incorrectly, he or she can still stay on and watch the rest of the quiz. A typical quiz has 10 to 20 questions, and runs for 20 to 30 minutes.

From a tech point of view, the online quiz is nothing but a live-stream with graphics being fired over it in real-time and supported by a game-play software that manages user responses. Since everything happens in real-time, often with as many as 50,000 concurrent users, the games depend heavily on a scalable and high-bandwidth cloud infrastructure.  

Take BaaziNow, the gaming app from Times Internet. “BaaziNow takes the online gaming phenomenon to the next level with live games such as BrainBaazi, PollBaazi and BingoBaazi that engage users across India. Our intuitive user interface has a strong focus on integrating gaming and interactive entertainment. This has helped achieve some great results in a short period,” says Gautam Sinha, chief executive officer, Times Internet.

The company claims that BrainBaazi, which was launched in February 2018, has got over 10 million downloads on the Android, with every user playing the quiz at least eight times in a month.

“Our team envisaged what mobile video entertainment could be with real participation from people via their mobile phones,” says Sinha. BrainBaazi beams its live quiz at 8.30 pm every day and disburses cash prizes worth Rs 50,000 to the winners.

BrainBaazi’s biggest competitor is Loco, a Mumbai-based startup that was acquired by media firm PocketAces in 2018. “A smartphone’s hallmark is interactivity and this has not been exploited to its potential thus far,” says Anirudh Pandita, co-founder of PocketAces, which produces web series and viral videos.

Like BrainBaazi, Loco has also got over 10 million downloads on Android, with as many as 60,000 concurrent users at times.

 “The extent of Loco’s success and the emotional impact it has had on the community is something we did not anticipate. People are playing it in groups, with friends in hostels, playing it at workplaces. I have heard that some companies have office happy hours around Loco. In the evening, people are playing with their families. Interestingly, our biggest winners on the app are from tier 2 towns in Jharkhand and Bihar or towns like Lucknow,” says Pandita.

PayTm, too, has a quiz game called Trivia Live, which streams at 9 pm every day with Rs 63,000 worth of prize money on offer. Trivia Live is part of a gamut of internet games offerings from Gamepind, a joint venture between Paytm and Alibaba. In August 2018, Alibaba-owned gaming company AGTech Holdings and Paytm invested $16 million to launch Gamepind.

Also crowding the field are such independent apps as Qureka Quiz, launched by a startup called CoolBoots Media, and IQ Live, which does a quiz show hosted by TV Personality Rohit Roy. They largely follow the same model with minor tweaks.

Clearly, the Indian quiz enthusiast is now spoilt for choice.