A once wildly popular app, HQ Trivia has been on a steady decline for almost a year. 

  HQ Trivia is a live game show app that allows you to answer trivia questions for money. The game is free on the App Store, so prize money is available. If a certain number of consecutive questions are answered correctly, the player will split the cash prize with the other winners. 

  Created in August 2017, HQ Trivia quickly rose to the top of the App Store charts,peaking as the number six overall app. By March 2018, the game had 2.38 million daily players.

  Ratings and participation significantly declined last April when the original host of HQ, Scott Rogowsky, left HQ to host a baseball show, ChangeUp, on the DAZN Network. This came after CEO Rus Yuspov would not allow Rogowsky to host ChangeUp while continuing to host HQ Trivia. Rogowsky ultimately decided to take the position at DAZN and left HQ in April 2019 without a farewell show.  

  The backup-turned-starter HQ host, “money flippin” Matt Richards, took Rogowsky’s role as the anchor at HQ. A typical game consists of an introduction by the host, usually Richards. Games are played every night at 9PM, and also at 3PM on weekdays. The host explains the rules of the game and how to play. Next, a ten second countdown begins, signling the game is about to start. Music blares in the background to excite the players for their upcoming chance to win some money. The entire pre-show routine takes about five minutes. 

  While the original version of HQ consisted of twelve questions, they have since expanded to seventeen questions, with chances to cash out at questions twelve, fifteen, and seventeen. Each question gets increasingly tougher, and if the player answers incorrectly, they are eliminated. The typical cash prize is $5,000, which is split evenly among the winners.

  Corporate sponsors such as Disney and Netflix sponsor the shows, allowing HQ to pay out winnings without participants having to pay in. The app also sells HQ merchandise, as well as power ups that include extra lives and erasers to keep players in the game even if they have been eliminated.

  A common complaint HQ players have are the frequent technical difficulties that occur. Often times, when there is a significant amount of players compared to the average night (like if the grand prize jackpot is $100,000), the game will malfunction, frustrating players. There have also been numerous instances when players have chosen the correct answer but have still been eliminated. 

  Another source of player frustration are the complaints on how small the winnings are for each player. Most of the time, players earn less than a dollar each time they win, since there are usually upwards of 1,000 winners per game. I would not recommend this trivia game to impatient individuals, since the host regularly rambles on about news such as the upcoming theme night on HQ, or the sponsor for that night’s game. 

  Personally, I stopped playing a few months ago with the main reason being that winning around sixty cents on HQ gets old after awhile. Sure, first time winners are sure to be elated when answering all the questions correctly, but do not necessarily feel the same way when taking a look at the small amount of money they won. 

  On the upside, HQ has been trying to fix this complaint by exploring new ways to enhance the players’ experience by creating HQ Sports (sports trivia) and HQ Words (solving word puzzles). 

 Overall, HQ Trivia gives new players an exciting twenty minutes to look forward to each day, but after awhile, most players would agree that the game show has become quite trivial.