With the UK being the leading producer of un-scripted TV formats, accounting for 42% of
worldwide export sales in 2020, it has proven to be a reliable source of some of the world’s
best entertainment.
A new start-up is helping the UK become the leader of next generation entertainment - live
mass participation gameshows where everyone watching is a contestant. The trend started
initially with the app HQ Trivia in 2017 which validated there was mass market appeal for
interactive shows.
“The reason we haven’t seen any mainstream live interactive gameshows since HQ Trivia is
because they are hard to create and there isn’t really a platform setup for people to easily
access them” says co-founder and CEO Tim Edwards.
Codices Interactive started their gameshow journey on the livestreaming platform Twitch
where they launched their gameshow extension Quiz Kit, which amassed over 4 million
monthly viewers and has been used by over a million different live-streamers to create live
online quiz shows.
They have worked with the likes of Amazon Prime Video, The Premier League and a number
of large game development studios to create new gameshow formats on Twitch. They also
ran the largest ever mass quiz show with studio Digital Extremes boasting over 350,000
concurrent participants whilst giving away over 100,000 prizes.
“The one thing everyone wants to do when watching a gameshow is play along. We found by
making them live and interactive it increased the enjoyment factor significantly.”
Last year, after raising around £1m in investment, they set out to build a brand new
gameshow platform, Moar, to facilitate the creation and supply of mass participation shows.
"Twitch is the best platform to watch video games content but we found the market for live
interactive shows was much broader than gamers."
Moar provides tools to creators to build their own live gameshow formats - starting out with
the ability to make quiz shows, live polls, give out prizes and bring on live guests through
their phone.
Another key aspect of the platform is making sure anyone with an internet connection can
make their own interactive gameshows.
“Today, anyone can be a content creator and we didn’t want to restrict the tools to
businesses or professionals by making them too complicated to use.“
Through watching shows on Moar viewers can also earn ‘stubs’, similar to winning tickets on
an arcade machine, which can be spent on in app rewards and a number of real life prizes
soon to be announced.
“Right now we are in our Open Beta phase so it’s a great time to install and take advantage
of our early offers and take a front row seat in seeing the platform develop” says Tim.
If you would like to experience Moar, either creating or watching some of their shows, you
can find them on the iOS App Store by searching Moar where they are running daily trivia
shows alongside shows run by new creators.