Many of you will probably be familiar with HQ, the live trivia app game, where if you get through 12 questions and it doesn’t bug out on you you get to share in a jackpot with loads of Americans. It’s Massively Multiplayer Everybody’s Equal, effectively.
I can’t get excited about it, but it sounds like there are now UK-centric games at UK-centric times.
In other news the Poll of the Year 2017 closes on Thursday night. Get your votes in!
We’ll have a discussion post for Britain’s Brightest Family tomorrow.
I’ve only played two games of HQ but am quite taken with it, by virtue of their ambition if nothing else. (Tales of how buggy and unreliable it is are legion.) It’s remarkable that they can get hundreds of thousands of players when the likes of Come and Have a Go If You Think You’re Smart Enough only purportedly got tens of thousands, and that had a TV show with millions of viewers behind it. Perhaps CaHaGIYTYSE was just years ahead of its time; I had to look up that it was back as far as 2004. Perhaps the 10-minute nature of HQ suits people’s lives better. Perhaps people are more used to playing games through apps these days. Perhaps the fact that people found out about it through the Internet, rather than over TV, makes a difference; TV slowly has to explain how to play, via a number of different routes, whereas an app can have the (remarkably light) barriers to entry before you download the app and start playing.
Let me take you back a quarter of a century to 1993. ORACLE had just given way to Teletext Ltd.’s service and we were starting to enjoy Bamboozle! on 4. Had you told me that 25 years later, there would be a properly interactive, reasonably high production value, massively multiplayer version of what is essentially the same game, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least by how the future would turn out.
My issue with this is that the USP – the live video feed – is going to become ever-more demanding on the servers, and I think growing pains in the US have shown that as their player numbers go up.
Also, the main host confirmed HQ is short for ‘Hard Questions’
HQ has a few competitors/tributes, notably TheQ, Genius-Quiz and Cash Show. I’ll talk a little about Cash Show because it has some slightly more interesting tweaks. I believe it may be effectively iOS-only for now – while it has a Google Play entry, I’m not aware of anyone having actually using it to play.
It is a similar 12-question 3-multiple-choice survivors-share-the-prize quiz, but the neat thing is that the (usually US$2,000) prize money per show is not just split among the survivors of the twelfth question; the first five questions have no prizes, the sixth question splits US$100 among its survivors, who will typically earn three or four cents from it. Later questions also have prizes and a typical prize distribution is $100-$100-$100-$200-$200-$300-$1000. Accordingly if you get all twelve questions right, you win shares of the seven prizes and might make four dollars or so in total – but if you crash out on Q10 or so then you might have made sixty cents or thereabouts. It has the same money-saving twist as HQ has (or, at least, had until very recently) where you have to reach a minimum threshold in order to actually get cash sent through PayPal, and you have to reach that threshold within 90 days. However, the threshold here is only US$10, and you will probably pick up several small sums along the way.
So it has a more forgiving and intriguing pay structure, and you can play a 50:50 once per game to get rid of one wrong answer. On the downside, the production values aren’t nearly as good; while the show is live, it’s not based on a continuous live stream, all the video/audio clips are pre-recorded, and there isn’t the same progression of question difficulty – the questions can start quite tough and then have Q12 as a total gimme, or there might be two remarkably similar questions in the same stack. It only has tens of thousands of players rather than a million or so, which means that it’s less likely to lag or crash, but it’s not perfect in my experience. The host is a Scott wannabe without the authenticity to carry it off and the pre-recorded introduction is the same every time, which gets quite old.
Nevertheless, it’s there and it purports to pay out money, and the games tonight and tomorrow night (starting reliably half an hour after HQ, so 8:30pm and 2:30am UK time) are apparently splitting US$10,000 per game rather than US$2,000. If you decide to give it a try, please be so kind as to use my referral code so that we might each get an extra life: ZZ4FG7 – thank you!
I won tonight!
How much? This is the important bit.
A cool $19.74
I’ll share my referral codes for HQ and CashShow should anyone else playing these need some more extra lives
HQ – Keshihead
CashShow – KNTWDG