Mixing up the geography, the gaming track of the Slush 2015 conference in Helsinki, Finland kicked off with Argentine Maximo Cavazzani, who’s the CEO of Trivia Crack developer Etermax..

“We didn’t start as a games company, but creating bank software. That was boring so Etermax became a social games company,” said Cavazzani.

Its first game was Apalabraodos, a game that could be played in multiple languages, although it was most popular in Spain, with a penetration rate of 50%.

Success in Latin America had to wait until smartphones were more popular in the region. Trivia Crack grew strongly in the region, and eventually this success grew into the US.

Going global

Cavazzani said, that the succcess of Trivia Crack came from recognising that you have to regionalise the questions.

“You need different questions in Chile compared to Argentina or Uruguay,” he explained.

Etermax didn’t have the resources to handle this internally so it moved to a user generated system.

Its Question Factory receives 1 million questions a day, which each being reviewed by multiple people before any go into production.

Trivia Crack is more than a game, however.

Akin to a social network, over 200 million messages sent per day; something which has seen Etermax sign an exclusive mobile advertising deal with Google’s AdMob, as well as a merchandising deal with Amazon.

And Etermax continunes to focus on the framework to build out Trivia Crack’s audience beyond its current 20 million DAUs.

Now players can create their own channels for custom questions; something Cavazzani compared to Twitter in its potential scale.