Early on at HQ Trivia, there would usually be huge viewership drop-offs in the games as players were eliminated. This was a problem for us, but it also presented several opportunities. We introduced extra lives into the app not just to retain players longer in the game, but to provide loyalty incentives (players could earn extra lives by playing more games), a non-monetary prize option (players could win extra lives in lower-stakes games), and an in-app purchase.
I was part of the team implementing this and ensuring that the game would still reward skilled players rather than being pay-to-win. We accomplished this by a few different means. We limited extra lives so that you could only use one per game, and only in the earlier questions. We also included some harder questions earlier on in the game.
In the video above, a player gets a question wrong — it is, after all, a fairly difficult question for Q6 — and is presented with a five-second screen that shows them the option to use their extra life. The player in this instance chooses to save their valuable extra life for a future game.
As it happens, I also was one of the writers behind this question.