I was working with fellow peers on a group project in my first-year seminar class at Arizona State University when two members phones lit up saying it's HQ time!
They both unlocked their phones and entered the app. Nearly 850,000 others did the same thing. With only three minutes before the app went live, I downloaded it on my own iPhone and logged in to find out what the craze was all about.
As I was downloading the app, they explained the premise to me:
HQ is a free app that takes a form of a live game show, which airs at 9 PM Eastern Time daily, with an extra show at 3 p.m. Eastern on weekdays. The host, Scott Rogowsky, will ask the viewers 12 increasingly difficult multiple choice questions. For each question, there are three choices to pick from and ten seconds to lock in your answer. If you get a perfect score of 12/12, then you along with all the others winners will split the cash prize. Right now, that typical cash prize is $2,500.
I got to question 6 and got the question wrong, but I stayed to watch how many of the 850,000 original players would split the $2,500. 35 people ended up winning which means they each won roughly $71.
The average winner wins around $10-$20 but that doesn't mean you can't close the app winning five grand like five lucky winners did the other night of Sunday, February 18th.
The app was started by two of the three creators of Vine: Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. HQ has been slowly climbing the apple trivia app charts since its launch in late August of 2017. The app was released as a beta demo for Android users in the beginning of January this year, which has helped the number of users grow exponentially.
It is in the #1 top free trivia app in the Apple App Store and ranked as #2 in the Google Play store for top free trivia app.
There are multiple reviews on various websites that mostly contain the same problems. HQ has had problems with lagging and glitches if the user is not connected to a strong WiFi and frequently users find themselves getting kicked out of the application for no reason. A lot of other complains include: only winning a small sliver of the 'grand prize' because of having to split it with so many people, you can't change your answer even if you accidentally click the wrong one and there still is time left on the clock, and the bad jokes said by Scott during the entire show.
Whether you download the app and love it or hate it, this new live streaming game show is less than a year old and has a lot of room to grow. Thousands of users are joining this latest online craze every day and are playing with people from all around the world for their chance to win real life money.
Also, If you find yourself wanting to download HQ, make sure to put in my referral code so I can get extra lives: hotsourmilk.
