Before I talk about how Buzztime can be handled and paid for differently, it would be good for those who don’t know to explain how the Buzztime systems work, and how it is possible for people to play from hundreds or even thousands of miles away from a location.
Old BuzztimeThe bar has a desktop computer and a number of boxes/tablets upon which players enter their answers. The boxes/tablets send the answers wirelessly to the desktop, and the desktop talks to the Buzztime compuers, displays the game, and does any other necessary processing.
“New” BuzztimeIf you ever played a game in a bar with a phone that had the Buzztime app, you probably think the phone is just a substitute for a box/tablet.
NO, IT ISN’T. It works an entirely different way.
Your phone doesn’t talk to the desktop or anything else in the bar. Instead, it talks directly to the Buzztime computers, which conveys things like your score to the bar computer. It seems like your phone is directly connected to the bar computer, but it isn’t.
You might ask, “If that’s so, then how does the Buzztime computer know where I am?” The answer is your phone tells it where you are. Normally, it uses built-in routines like GPS location that figure out where you are, and tells that to any other program that wants to know, like the Buzztime app.
Software can override whatever the normal routines are on your phone and tell it to tell anything else that you are wherever you wish to say you are. So I can sit in New York City and use this software to tell my phone to tell the Buzztime app that I’m in Walsh's in a Chicago suburb, and when I sign into the Buzztime app, it will think I’m in Walsh's and I can play the game and have my scores show up on Walsh's leaderboard.
This is called GPS spoofing. How hard is it to do? For Android phones, it’s pretty simple. You can get the software for free. If you can follow fairly simple instructions and can read a roadmap, you can do this. We’ve used cheap burner phones to do this, and they work OK. It’s possible, but rather more difficult to do this with iOS phones.
The Buzztime app is a far more modern approach to playing this game It cuts out all the middlemen; it’s just your phone dealing with Buzztime. You don’t need to be near a bar computer or bar to play the game, unlike the old Buzztime system. Any location limitations come from Buzztime, not the technology, unlike old Buzztime.
If your experience of this technology is having some invisible intruder stage a home invasion of your location and conquer your leaderboard, your only likely question is “How do we stop this?” While I am not a programmer, after looking into this, I’m pretty sure Buzztime could stop most of this pretty easily without knocking out all Buzztime app use in a location, which at least was recent policy. Why haven’t they done so? Either they don’t want to lose the extra players and plays, or their programmers don’t know what to do. I could believe either. (I know they’ve had someone doing programming because they did something a while back which changed the Android requirement from version 6 to 8 without telling anyone.)
Let’s review the important points: Buzztime does not need to create a new system to enable remote play; they already did that with the Buzztime app. The Buzztime app could deliver all the games by itself; it does not need fixed locations to do that. Any restrictions are Buzztime crippling their own system, which can be circumvented with GPS spoofing. What Buzztime needs to do isn’t to stop remote play; it needs to make remote play pay, like all the other streaming services out there.
If Buzztime is going to last, it will be the Buzztime app and its successors that are going to have to lead the way, not the old stuff.
Video Playing and Its Limitations
If you have a team, and you’re not in one place, how can you play together? This is why God created Zoom (or equivalent). The cost for a Zoom license is nominal, for me a little over $10 a month. As long as you can hear each other, nothing else really matters. But that can sometimes be a problem.
A good question some of you have is, “What would stop you from getting (some huge group of enormous brains) together and do a Godzilla on the rest of us?” There’s the small issue of getting such a group to show up and play with you, but even if you did that, you would have to be able to hear them and that is a big self-limiting factor with a big group in Zoom. Go over ten people, and you have problems hearing individuals over each other. We’ve had people stop playing with us for that reason.
On the other hand, we also miss out on a different kind of roar, the noise of the bar/restaurant.
But this is being used for cheating!! I have seen this!Yes, you can cheat using this technology, but you can cheat the same way in a bar with a phone. How does that cheating work? Buzztime has always done a bad job of synchronizing the clocks on their locations. This means Location A will show a question/answer before/after Location B. Occasionally, the time gap between the two can be so big that you can see the answer in Location A before having to answer that question in Location B. This is the main means by which a few individuals have been able to rack up endless near-perfect scores. However, this requires very deliberate effort by that individual to see the game at multiple locations; this kind of time lag does not occur when all are playing at one location. From my personal observations, very few people are playing the time lag game. Far more are simply using your location as a place to play..
Why don’t you get Buzztime Lite?We didn’t/would not get Buzztime Lite mainly because it is not adapted to remote play. Unless all the players came to my house, they could not play the game from their houses unless they used GPS spoofing. Just as we could go to any location with spoofing, if we got Buzztime Lite, anybody with spoofing could play at our location. If Buzztime ever blocked spoofing, they would block my team as well.
But Now There Is Buzztime Go!! Yes, there is. It is designed for solo play. It is quick, and you get to choose the subject of the game. Those are big plusses. There is no live competition in the games, no leaderboard. At the end of a game, you get told you did better than XX% of other players. This is a huge minus. If you normally want competition, or want to play as part of a team, Buzztime Go is not an option.
So What Can We Do Instead?What Buzztime needs to do is set up their own hybrid situation: retain free play in bars/restaurants and create a new paying player category to create a second means of playing. Buzztime would charge a set monthly fee for access to some or all of the same games as the bars. This would work solely through the Buzztime app.
The use of locations would be expanded. Paying players could choose to join an existing location or create their own. Teams could be formed/disbanded by groups deciding to join or leave a “place.”
With the carrots come a necessary stick: devices using GPS spoofing must be automatically blocked from the Buzztime system. As I pointed out earlier, this can be done for most devices without blocking the use of phones, etc. in the bar; this is likely to be more difficult for iOS than Android phones, but spoofing Is more difficult with iOS, too.
So how would this change how my team plays? If a member of my team wanted to play, with our team or by himself, he would have to pay Buzztime a monthly fee, just like Netflix. He would have to do that because if he tried to use GPS spoofing to pretend to be in a bar, Buzztime wouldn’t let him in. When he signed in, he would no longer sign into some bar in New Jersey or Long Island; he would sign into “our” place, and that would be his (and our) location on leaderboards. Assuming Showdown was included in the games covered by the monthly fee, there would be no need to continue with the “Hybrid Showdown” play; we would just play Showdown remotely, and pay Buzztime directly to play that and all the other games.
Creating and maintaining a subscription system would be a significant cost, and one can reasonably doubt initial revenues would justify the outlay. If the only purpose of the exercise was to gather up the lost sheep of the tribe of Buzztime, I couldn’t justify it.
But the same old, same-old didn’t really work in the good old days, and it’s a lot worse now. Buzztime has to decide whether or not it wants to keep living. It may think staying the same is the way to go, but there’s just no future in catering to a dwindling remnant of old fogies with a dwindling remnant of old locations, especially when there aren’t a stream of new fogies showing up as replacements.
Come on out, RipIs trivia dead, a fading fad like doo-wop or disco?. Not at all. Non-Buzztime trivia is doing wonderfully. In a city of eight million that just got a single Buzztime location in an outlying section of an outer borough after a two year lapse, here is some of what else is happening:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/nyregion/nyc-trivia-league-kings-cup.htmlhttps://nyctrivialeague.comAlmost four times the number of players who play Showdown nationally played in this New York tournament. So many players! So many locations! And so young and so unlike our geriatric Buzztime!!! You can play at a bar. You can play virtually, too.
In contrast, Buzztime looks like more like a post-nuclear holocaust production. The original business and most of the customers are gone, and the successor business and a small remnant of survivors continue the ancient rituals because they can’t think of anything better to do.
Which group is going to be around ten, twenty years from now? What makes more sense: to try to pick up a few more old fogies, or try to get these people and others like them?
Any Signs of Life Out There?
If you have any questions, comments or complaints, I’m all ears.