Microsoft Rewards Fans Are Preparing For A New Era On Xbox This Week

I have only ever collected the points for playing gamepass games, so it would take me months to get anything really. I usually got a fiver two-three times a year. The current “play for five days” thing means im now getting over 1000 points a month. For someone who wasnt ever going to go through the effort of collecting points in the previous way, this actually works out a lot better, but i appreciate it wont be the same for everyone.

Wonder how many that voted "disappointing" feel that way and mainly upset they'll legitimately have to pay for indie....I mean Game Pass out their pockets now?

It's free money and better than what the competition offers but it's still no where near as generous as it used to be.

I never had them weekly streaks in my region but I'm earning more points than ever now with the new system

To be honest, I never really paid attention to it until figured out I can get the Elden Ring DLC for free. Now it's a daily thing to get points. At it current state, its great for me and it has offered more in the past but so be. Its free money for doing pretty much nothing and with a little patience, will work out. After I redeem for Elden ring DLC, I'm going to save up for Star Wars Outlaws and purchased it at a sale price

As usual whenever I finally get into the loop the thing gets nerfed to oblivion. It sounded like people could make a ton of points during it's hayday.

I can't even access the rewards on Xbox any more. As far as I can tell, MS doesn't recognise my ISP, so it thinks I might be using a VPN to tunnel in from an unsupported region. The only way I can access them is by physically unplugging the Xbox and tethering it to my phone. And unlike the old MS Rewards app that only locked me out once a month, the new system locks me out of rewards the moment I plug the ethernet cable back in.

Ironically my PC can access it fine. Because it's behind a VPN.

I will always defend a company giving us something for nothing so I am a fan of MS rewards. It takes me an age to get enough points for a month of GPU but it’s better than nothing.

By the end of 2024 Rewards Points will either be gone or scale with the Zimbabwe dollar.

Honestly it not bad. Nintendo gives very little points. With Nintendo you only get a few gold points which can be used for purchasing games, platinum points are for digital content like in mobile Nintendo games or Switch avatars, or a few items can be bought after paying shipping. Playstation has the stars program which only give's points on purchases if you have ps + and you can only get a handful of points otherwise, spend $70 - $90 on a game you can get 50 points on selected games and a $5 Playstation card is 1250 points.

Still pretty generous imo (easy to ‘pay’ for 6-8 months of Gamepass Ultimate over a 12 month period). Difficult to grumble about that sort of generosity.

Unfortunately with the change in program, I can’t redeem points anymore. In order to redeem points, I need to add a phone number to my Microsoft account, but the account dashboard won’t let me link my phone number, because it says it’s already attached to a Microsoft account. The account in question is one that I haven’t had access to for nearly a decade and have long since forgotten any information for.

@Rodimusprime13 Honestly I think compared to MS rewards, PS stars is as good if not better if you buy most of your games digitally. It might be different in Canada but in UK I get 10 points for every pound spent so a £70 gets me 700 points (if it’s one of the selected games of the month I might get an extra 50 which I think is what you were alluding to). £5 credit is indeed 1250 points but on Xbox it’s at least 5900 points…nearly five times as much. At the end of the day whichever store front you use the most is going to give you the most value but the credit system on stars is certainly not to be sniffed at. I don’t really understand the level system on MS rewards (apparently I’m only level 1?!) but I bought Dragon's Dogma 2 on Xbox and only got 53 points for it. That would have been 530 on PS and nearly half way to a £5 credit.

It ain’t what it used to be but there just isn’t a better Rewards program to get free games or sub, my latest use case for my points is to use them for one month of Ubisoft+ or Game Pass when there’s a notable game launch, I essentially get to play those games day one for free and later buy them on sale if I liked them.

@GeeEssEff You’re tripping, it may give you more points for buying things but there’s almost no way to earn points without buying stuff, only a couple 50 points campaigns each month and only if you have PS+, it’s nowhere near comparable to MS Rewards.

The 2024 nerf is nowhere as bad as the 2023 nerf. We used to get a 50 pt daily for just earning an achievement on a Gamepass title. People were claiming that they were easily earning 25,000 points monthly during 2023.

Definitely a bit disappointing but there's still more than enough to get Gamepass for "free" so not really the end of the world. Not a good trend though I will admit

A few months ago it was possible to get up to 700 points regularly in a single day, thats using all means (Bing, Web search ect..Through all of that I had a daily regiment that took roughly 10/15 mins) 2 weeks ago it was about 400 points. As of now it's so nerfed, barely making 80 regular points in a day. Its a joke. They made it all almost worthless. They made it where you can not do consecutive searches anymore to complete your daily searches.

Y'all ungrateful..

@CaptnTedo saying only 80 points a day is quite an exaggeration. I'm up to 350+ a day before even finishing breakfast lol. While it's definitely down from where it was in the past, it's not THAT bad. The search nerf is not nearly as egregious as people have made it seem, at least from my experience

They’re certainly well on the way to destroying it. However, I “think” I can still get enough to earn GamePass each month. It will be close, that’s probably the breaking point for me if that goes goodbye.

@cardcrusher29 I used to earn about 35-36k every 6 weeks. That's without trying get to score an achievement every day. I knocked $25-50 off of SF6 & MK1 ultimate and Tekken deluxe editions.

It's all funny money; I'm not complaining. There still plenty of points to be made. My GPU membership (28 months) still grows.

@GeeEssEff Hear are the ratios in Canada
Sony $1 - 10 points 1250 points $5
MS $1 - 20 points 3465 points $5
I have Level 2 with MS and Level 3 with Sony. Yes there is a reduced amount of points required but there is almost no way to earn points outside of purchases, as long as you subscribe to PS plus. Without PS plus you earn nothing. MS actually allows you to earn free points without purchasing anything.

Rewards have never worked where I live, but still sucks for those who use it regularly.

@theduckofdeath
You're right. There's still plenty of points to redeem for Gamepass or gift card for games. I still view MS rewards as a half full situation like you. I do miss the 50 point daily for an achievement. Even with less points for a daily achievement, I get to explore the Gamepass library at reasonable pace.

Well I have been using it since I have returned to Xbox a couple of years back and when I realised it could be used for getting Gamepass for nothing I pretty much went all in on using it. So it has paid for itself and I just got to a 100 week streak last week so I guess there is nice way to round out it's closure for me. Still I earn about half of what I used to a month which used to be between 23 and 26K so it is still about enough get Gamepass ultimate every month. Anything else I currently have saved is a bonus and some people seem overly entitled to the older amounts which is crazy when you consider it was free. Still more may be added when they fully switch over in the next week of so.

@IOI That’s why I said “if you buy most of your games digitally” right at the start of my comment.

@Rodimusprime13 See those ratios are actually pretty good. However I did some googling and you only get the 20 points per £/$ if you are on GPU and are earning 400 points per month. If you’re not on GPU it’s 1 point hence my 53 points for DD2. I also don’t understand why credit in UK costs so much more points.

Like I said in my first comment in this thread, any company willing to do a half decent reward programme is good. Ms rewards is good if you play your console daily, are willing to do little tasks daily on various different apps and it’s significantly better if your subbed to GPU and play GP games. PS stars is good if you have PS plus and buy games digitally. They have both, unsurprisingly, built their reward programmes around what their core demographics are doing.

Personally I don’t play games every day, i subscribe to GPU intermittently but PS plus a year at a time, I buy most of my games digitally, 95% them are on PS and I’d rather put pins in my eyes then use Bing. It’s not rocket science which one I am going to get more value out of. I’m absolutely not crapping on MS rewards here either I’m just saying for certain things they are comparable and one of those things is purchase to credit conversion….at least in the UK where MS credit seems to cost 4.5 times as much as PS

Unavailable in m Country, so this is a big big nothing

So easy to get 2500 points every 10 weeks to build up your currency, but all good things come to an end. As much as I hate to see this go weekly set go away, I can't say no to free money, I get around $10 a month via, pc and Bing on mobile. I love Microsoft Rewards and I hope that they continue to evolve for the better.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like MS just moved most of the points you would've gotten in the rewards app to the rewards hub instead? The rewards app gave you 2500 points every 10 weeks.

Just doing the math, the weekly conslole bonus still gives us 2500 points every 10 weeks, just in the form of 250 points a week for playing our consoles just 15 minutes a day for 5 days (the move was more than likely to drive gamepass engagement). The big loss with the move is the 100 point weekly task bonus. Instead of earning 1k every ten weeks, we are only earing 250, as you get 25 bonus points for being an GPU member. That's a loss of 750 points, the full 1K if you're not in GPU.

Of course we're also missing out on those other random offers like checking out a game on Youtube and other stuff that showed up that gave you 5-10 points here and there in the rewards app.

Granted the program is not as great as it once was, but it's still a fairly generous offering for doing what I'm already doing anyways... playing games. That's not even mentioning doing brainless tasks like searching for things everyday in bing/edge that takes all but 10 minutes of my time.

Probably not a great take, but for me even though they nerfed some things, they streamlined other things that makes earning points feel less of a grind than it has in the past.

@redd214 It was the exact same way for me then a few weeks ago, they nerfed all my internet searches. I can no longer claim points doing consecutive internet searches anymore. It is the same across all Bing for me. I can do 3 searches then it won't give anymore points at all. I remember hearing how they nerfed searches many months ago but it didn't effect me untill a few weeks ago.

@CaptnTedo man that sucks. Worked fine for me this morning just as always. The search timer is very inconsistent from my exp for whatever reason. Some days it let's me rapid fire searches and the next it seems like 20+ seconds are needed in between. Hope it gets back on track for you!

@IOI For those of us that buy games though, it feels better, I've had £35 this year for simply buying digital games I was gonna buy anyway.
For those who don't buy many games though, and are prepared to do what's required, the MS scheme certainly used to be much better. I hope they adjust it so people get the same value from it in the future.

In a way I'm kinda glad we don't have to use that rewards app anymore.
Could just be on my end, but it was just so incredibly slow, using up to a minute or two just to load in.

The rewards program has taken plenty of hits over the years it seems. But it has been nice being able to earn something passively as a form of 'loyalty' program. Have never been able to drag in enough points like some have though

I personally am quite happy with the new MS rewards program. The cost to redeem for a $5 Xbox card is lowered and it's easy to get free points with minimal effort. I have be getting $5 gift cards every month or two, since they only cost 3500 points but Ultimate is 12000 points unfortunately. Under the old rules it was hard to rack up points unless you spent ages doing pointless activities.