The team behind HQ Trivia, the smash hit mobile app where you answer multiple choice questions in hopes of siphoning away venture capital funding, today announced it was removing the $20 cash-out minimum. The announcement, made on Twitter ahead of today’s 3PM ET / 12PM PT game, should provide some relief to winners of the game who’ve had money stuck in their accounts because their particular jackpot didn’t reward enough cash.

The $20 limit was always a puzzling move, and it led some critics to speculate that HQ was using it as a way to avoid doling out too much money as it ballooned in popularity over the last few months. In a piece just this week from The Verge’s sister site Vox, writer Aja Romano pointed out how HQ may be using this $20 limit, coupled with its 90-day time limit on collecting winnings before the company can refuse to pay you, as a way to strategically withhold prizes from winners. At the very least, HQ could have implemented the minimum for reasons related to bank transfer fees or some other behind-the-scenes hurdle.

Regardless, it wasn’t a very user-friendly feature, as most games these days are won by hundreds of players and prize pools tend to remain in the single digits. (The woman whose post-victory meltdown went viral and got her a spot on The Ellen DeGeneres Show won a grand total of $11.) So earning enough money to cash out meant either being lucky enough to split a prize pool that rewarded you more than $20, or wining multiple games. The latter is incredibly hard to do given the game’s obtuse question formulation that tends to use near-impossible-to-know factoids to weed out large numbers of contestants. Many people who do win do so by blindly guessing at least once or twice it seems like, making repeat victories a real challenge.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16937948/hq-trivia-20-dollar-cash-out-limit-removed