It pays to know
What asks questions and gives winners money? The HQ trivia app.
I CANNOT believe that I woke up at 3.30am to play HQ, one of the most talked about trivia apps right now. The game was scheduled to start at 4am (it was 3pm in the United States), and almost 500,000 people from around the world tried to get their hands on the US$2,000 (RM8,000) prize money.
HQ is a live streaming 15-minute online gameshow, launched last August by Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov.
The duo were also part of the founding team for Vine, which was acquired by Twitter for reportedly US$30mil (RM120mil) in 2012 and subsequently shutdown in 2016.
HQ requires players to correctly answer 12 questions. There are multiple-choice answers, and players only have 10 seconds to pick the right one. Some of the questions are relatively simple, like “What is the common colour in the flags of Canada, Norway and China?”. The answer is of course red, although a few thousand people inexplicably chose “peach”.
Then it gets really random like “How many times does the word “sex” appear in the US Constitution?” or “Which retro fashion style did not make a comeback this year?”.
Unless you’re playing with a bunch of people who can type and look for answers at lightning speed, Googling won’t help. However, a Mashable writer did document her cheating ways, admitting to using Google’s voice assistant to get the answers, and winning US$11 (RM44) in the end.
If a player answers the question incorrectly, they will be immediately eliminated from the round.
However, they can use one “Extra Life” per game. The extra lives are earned by inviting friends to join the game.
If a player answers all the questions correctly, they get all the prize money to themselves, but if the game has more than one winner, the money is divided equally among them.
Usually, the prize money is valued at around US$2,000 (RM8,000), though on New Year’s Eve, the players vied for US$18,000 (RM72,000). If there isn’t a winner, the prize money rolls over to the next day.
The first game I played saw 411 people sharing the prize, each of them winning US$4.87
(RM19.48), while the second game saw 13 winners out of over
700,000 participants winning US$153.85
(RM615) each. There is also a second game scheduled at 10am (9pm in the US). There are usually only two games per day, but sometimes, they do announce a special game as and when. Users are required to sign in using their mobile phone number, and the money they win is kept in their digital account, and once it reaches US$20 (RM80), they can cash it out via PayPal.
In HQ’s FAQ section, it states that the prize money is sponsored by their partners, affiliates and marketers. The app is currently free on Android and iOS devices, and surannoying prisingly doesn’t feature any ads. Unfortunately, HQ can be glitchy at times and players can be cut off the game without an explanation. If that happens, users can opt to stay and watch or leave the game and join the next round.