Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass

Yeah Microsoft, keep the f*ck you’s coming to your most dedicated user base…

😂 This news is priceless. Well it definitely gave me a good laugh at least. 🤣

Man, it's like they're on a mission to completely ruin whatever good reputation Xbox still has. It's one screw-up after another.

Rewards is what keeps me paying for Ultimate. I normally get a month subscription with the reward points, then keep purchasing. I'm sure a month isn't going to harm their pockets.

@Gabrielmpf

Agreed.

Jesus Christ.

Does Microsoft have any feet left they can shoot themselves in.

For a multi trillion dollar company you would think they could hire some half decent PR guys.

‘Explore the catalog to redeem points for other prizes’

Yeah Microsoft, until you also nerf those said prizes or raise the points costs to ever higher levels, while making points ever harder to get.

Microsofts Marketing Mess continues

Very poorly worded and I do hope it doesn't mean they're taking it away for good!

This alone is going to drop the number of people who have GP, and like the price hikes they'll somehow be shocked when this not only doesn't improve things but worsens them.

Just got the email about this and it just seems poorly worded.

My 10500 point auto redeem is ending but it encouraged me to switch to another auto redeem at 12000 points. It's a price rise in line with all the others but nothing disastrous.

Xbox used to be a gaming platform, until it took an entire of quiver of arrows to the knee. From it's own quiver. Using its own bow. And a crossbow. And a sawed-off Remington. And an MP40. And a steak knife. And a toothpick.

This should be a question on standardized aptitude testing.

"You're in charge of a large subscription service for entertainment content. For years your subscription numbers have failed to meet expectations. Shareholders are seeking strategies to meet projected growth. Will you:

A) Reduce prices to encourage new subscribership
B) Run a marketing campaign with promotional pricing to raise awareness of the product and convince new potential customers to test the product
C) Add additional package options that remove the main feature and tell no one what it includes
D) Raise prices
E) Remove incentives and rewards programs to discourage customer retention
F) Announce that the included content will be part of competing company's offerings.
G) Promise C, D, E, and F will not happen to allay customer concerns.
H) A, B, and G
I) C, D, E, F and G

Anyone who provides the correct answer, I, gets a full scholarship to the Harvard MBA undergraduate and post-graduate program from Microsoft Corporation. This kid smells like success and the milk that's been in the Xbox fridge since it launched.

Party is over. Whiners are gonna whine but who can seriously think that Ms will let ones play for free indefinitely? All good things come to an end...

For the gamers!! All I see are moves that benefit the consumer!!

They are trying to increase the revenue from the game pass subscriptions, since the subs aren't growing as they'd like. This is just another way they are attacking that "problem".

I understand that this had to happen, as the rewards were generous enough to almost fully fund a gamepass subscription on their own. But it sucks to have this happen right on the heels of a price increase.

Also, I've never been able to get the auto-redeem thing to work anyway. I've always had to buy the 3-month subscription, which looks like it is also going to increase. This is probably going to make me reconsider my subscription more than the price increase itself.

Xbox right now is like Sideshow Bob continually stepping on rakes and getting smacked in the face, except Microsoft put the rakes there themselves.

Time after time, the most interesting stories on PX this year are how Xbox shoots itself in the foot. I can’t even understand how things are this mismanaged.

@NEStalgia Thank you for the chuckle, I needed that today!

@InvaderFromSpace Absolutely. The traditional thinking with these types of bad news is that it’s best to drop it all at once, so you might have a bad week or two before everyone moves on — rather than dragging it out with multiple bombshells.

The problem as I see it:

1)These bundles of bad news are dropping so frequently that it’s still dragging out

2) MS is doing nothing with messaging to steer the narrative, choosing to stay quiet as everyone is confused/frustrated and more damaging rumors spread.

They are trying their best to lose fans arnt they

A Game Pass tier (For Console) without online didn't make sense. It's confusing, so I expected it to disappear. If the upcoming Game Pass Standard includes online and everything but the high-profile titles like Call of Duty, it's exactly what people were asking for. Those titles would be added later to the cheaper tier, apparently. Cheap prices and getting Ultimate for free with Rewards were mostly a marketing strategy that they're probably adjusting now long term. Game Pass still is the best value in gaming, just probably not giving itself for little or nothing from now on.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner One thing I've learned in recent years: no matter how deep the hole one is in, they can always keep digging.

Used to do my rewards religiously every day ...and have earned hundreds of pounds worth of Xbox vouchers....but completely gave up when they started changing it ...putting cool downs on searches etc

@DonkeyFantasy

The Activision purchase really does seem like a poison chalice more and more.

Oh God...MS really wants to drag the Xbox brand to the ground, eh?

@Pac_Bot this makes sense. Similar for the last price hike

@NEStalgia LOL! You made my day with that standardized aptitude test.

It is so true, indeed. They're succeeding on driving customers away by any means necessary.

game pass is done. xbox is done. nothing new here.

let the team xbox clown music continue.

friends, if any of you have hopes for xbox beyond being a publisher, please open your eyes ok.

activision has turned xbox into activision.

@NEStalgia I'd say they have done all these things for better or worse. They have had promotions, one dollar entry fees, I think I let it lapse and got to return for a dollar, tried friends and family plans in some regions. And now the confused messaging....

Not really a surprise if they let the promo pricing and rewards freebies lapse. If they cannot get new subs, charge more for the people who already sub and hope they stay on. I'm subbed through next March, through rewards auto redeem and discounted codes. Then I'll have to decide if it's worth an undiscounted 20 per month. Assuming they don't just change the number of rewards points for auto redeem, in which case I likely will still earn every other month free

@NEStalgia The problem with A is after a solid decade of failure, this team had one final chance, one Hail Mary - Starfield and absurd price drops down to $350 bundled with Diablo 4. Thats your A. They still couldn't give the ****ing things away. The grown ups had enough and here we are, no more allowance.

I 100% agree with you, but all these changes (the impending slow death of Xbox console division) really is the result of the decade of failure that lead up to now, not what is happening now and what is coming.

In other words, you're right about what Microsoft would do if they were trying to save Xbox. What we are at right now is the very beginning stages of them sunsetting Xbox. They dont want to save it. They clearly arent particularly good at what they do considering Xbox's market share so many years after the Xbone blunder, but they also arent THAT stupid.

And to answer your question from yesterday about knowing what Satya and Amy have in store, no I'm not nearly creative enough, but I guarantee theres a very detailed roadmap in place and they cant wait to forget all of this and put all this effort into their upcoming mobile app store instead (in case many here continually forget, the real reason they bought ABK).

@themightyant
Don't be so sure, it was just a year or two ago that Microsoft disabled the ability to use points towards an Xbox Design Labs controller. If you want a custom controller now you have to pay in full without using rewards.

@Jenkinss Is the mobile app store plan still alive? I remember having read about that here, but we haven't heard anything new.

But yeah, as NES and you have said it, it seems that the endgame for MS is the mobile app market.

I better lube up my ass for the next set of changes my god we will have more changes by the end of the year i bet that bleed more out of us!🤦🙈💩

Considering how open people are about trying to abuse it, I can sort of understand, but it still sucks.

I don't really focus on rewards but every so often I do cash in for a Starbucks card. I'm personally indifferent, but the timing could have been better.

@Jenkinss I agree, but also disagree about one key point: The decade of failure. We all know Matrick imploded the Xbox that was in 2013. But, it was on a very steady trajectory of rebuilding all the way up through the Series launch. It was selling well, it was selling out, it was catching up. What put them on the point there are on now is a mix of 1 - they launched a year or two too early to keep up with PS5, they weren't ready yet, games weren't ready yet. 2 - within a year of launch they suddenly pivoted away from paying attention to console and putting ALL focus on CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD, which as you said, was really all about MOBILE MOBILE MOBILE. Then 3 - As soon as ABK happened internally, all talk of cloud vanished completely, and the focus was abk abk abk which was really about mobile mobile mobile.

The REAL timeline as I see it is that Nadella gave Phil leave to rebuild Xbox back in 2014, they were doing ok with that, but by the time they launched the Series, the internal thinking shifted entirley, for corporate reasons, on how to get into the mobile pie. First with cloud, then with king. They were already done thinking about the console by late 2020 and actively ignored it and let it rot.

I do foresee a wave of stupidity killing even their publishing arm from here though. I think they will be so singularly focused on mobile and the endless money pit it represents, they will bank on that being a great windfall even if they have no solid footing in it. Nadella has made MS rich, not through great business plans but through smartly investing the money they ALREADY had in OTHER companies that turn profits. He's a stock broker sitting in the boardroom. Not a tech leader. He's a one-track-mind buffoon of a leader who latches onto one single concept with a death grip, and will focus on nothing except that one single concept, and will ride it into the volcano or until he sees something shinier from the corner of his eye. It's not just Xbox, it's the whole of MS he's doing that with.

@HarmanSmith Yeah Sarah Bond mentioned the app store in that (awkward) interview months ago, so it's definitely on the near-term plans.

I still don't know how they have a plan to actually make it successful though. Why would users go out of their way to use a store other than the App Store they're already familiar with unless there's significant incentive to do so? And anyone that pays enough attention to MS gaming to know that the app store exists at all will also know all about MS's bait and switch tendencies and will probably just shrug and go back to Apple....which is why they were using Apple products to begin with....

I gave up on Microsoft Rewards well over a year ago and I don't imagine these upcoming changes will affect that.

@NEStalgia They definitely made the decision to chase mobile a while ago, but I truly believe Xbox was fighting a winnable battle within MS until this holiday season sales catastrophe. The direction shift starting in Jan/Feb was just too stark, beginning with the leaks presumably by disgruntled employees/true believers who knew what anyone with a good amount of sense knows - porting your games to that other console is a signal of the end. Phil and Sarah got the rug pulled out from. Their demeanor publicly is different, they sometimes look like deer in headlights as they pretend to be in charge, justifying others' decisions. This wasn't preordained, it could have been avoided with success.

For perspective, it may have been a decade of building, but they Xbox Series consoles are going to wind up selling less than the Xbox One.

@Jenkinss That may have been the turning point, but the problem was that the holiday sales crisis happened as a direct response to the years of neglect of the console from chasing mobile and only mobile. 2 years ago they'd have been sold out in less than 5 minutes at that price. And scalpers would have been selling them for double list price for a week. The fact that no one, not even scalpers could have cared less by this holiday is the result of the past 3 years the platform being so ignored and mistreated that the entire public lost any and all interest in it BEFORE the holiday.

It was a self fulfilling prophecy. MS declared Xbox doomed (or at least trivial and unimportant compared to the gold mine of mobile) years ago, ignored Xbox, chased mobile, then after years of that tried to give out Xboxes with Happy Meals and people couldn't even be bothered. I don't think Xbox was fighting a winnable battle, because Microsoft was busy getting the white flags embroidered in gold filigree since December 2020. They COULD have won, had they been allowed to arrive at the battlefield before it was converted into a minimall.

If they properly ran the platform from 2021-2023 demand would have been there. The lack of demand is a result of everything that happened from 2021 to 2023. We all had shiny new Xboxes and all we heard about was the future of cloud cloud cloud. They stopped talking about our Xboxes. And yet it wasn't the goal because that talk of cloud all but disappeared. And was replaced with abk. if you didn't actively follow xbox, you didn't know it existed.

Agree totally about Phil and Sara's demeanor. Although there's one other aspect of this, much as it all lines up is - it's not just Xbox. And it's not just the sales disaster or even mobile. This transformation seems to be going on across the whole of MS as well. As soon as Nadella went on the AI warpath he's had it consume everything - they've been downsizing Azure itself (!), they've flipped off Intel and AMD, they're forcing disasters into Windows, and flipping off the press, with even the AI leads having that same deer in headlights pose as Phil and Sarah. A lot of this is about Xbox, but some of it I think isn't all about Xbox, MS itself is undergoing some sort of internal Nadella lead metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a balrog.

At this point the choice comes down to if it's better to play in Sony's monopoly or Nvidias.

@themightyant hoo ha!

@NEStalgia Great comment! This aptitude test Needs to be sent to Microsoft’s lack-of Management Team.

Understand the change, and it does impact me since i do 3 months rewards one month pay in that cycle, but I understand the change.

Will review the new options when they come out. I stand by gpu being a great value at $20 a month. However, ill assess it with each change.

In this instance ill probably just convert the points to movie rentals and non gp game purchases since i get about 10-12k a month just doing normal activities. (Ie no grinding)

@NEStalgia The thing about the ABK acquisition is what you're saying is true, but I don't believe you're nailing the intent. The reason they were radio silent after the ABK announcement was because of the lawsuits and regulatory bodies. They couldn't crow about their platform (which is all marketing is), while telling the courts they lost the console war and were in distant 3rd. The problem is, it dragged on for years, and it became a self fulfilling prophecy. By the time the acquisition went through and they could actually do marketing again, they had lost so much mindshare - from a distant 3rd starting point - well I don't need to tell you. But my point is just intent, I really don't think their intent at that point was to sink Xbox, it wouldn't make sense. The legal battle went on far too long. Xbox is just sad collateral damage to launch their Candy Crush / CoD Mobile store.

Damn there sure are a lot of you guys who are really pissed off that Xbox isnt going to be giving them free game pass ultimate anymore...
Kinda felt inevitable to me that it wouldnt last forever.
Should be happy it lasted as long as it did... Got GP Ultimate for free for like 4 years.

@Jenkinss I agree on most of that history, except they started ignoring the new Xbox about 14 months into launch when they pivoted hard to cloud being the only thing they talked about. Series was the future from September 2020 to January 2021. The rest of 2021 was all cloud only cloud everything new was all for cloud and touch controls for mobile. Did you know that a third of gp subscribers use only touch controls? Did you know that, console players? Did you? You who bought that scalped Xbox for $1200? Did you? 2021 was when they forgot series x exists. Before they had to tell the courts how bad their console sells and how nobody ever uses cloud anyway.

I think the real problem is they weren't actually lying to the court by the time they got there because they already spent a year selling cloud services that STILL don't exist.

I've got two years stacked and two years with my broadband and now just got another year so it's been awhile since I've redeemed a GP voucher.

Can GP be bought with account credit? If so just get store vouchers or get Amazon vouchers, yes it will cost more points but you will still make a saving.

It seems clear to me that Xbox have got themselves in a right muddle over everything right now. A handheld rumoured, a new more powerful than ever console?
Sticking a huge finger up at Xbox console Game Pass subscribers. Possibly ending Xbox hardware in Europe.
Game Pass subs up in prices and day one releases / the big sellers for Game Pass not available to everyone.

Just what is Xbox today? Does Xbox even know?

From day to day they just lurch from one confusion to another.

Also, the Activison Blizzard deal will take time to come through - yes they can say sales are up based on the companies they have taken over, but they need to make 69 billion just to start breaking even on the deal.

I feel that the heads at Microsoft and those at Xbox have become totally detached. It’s feels like the retina has become detached from the eye and now it’s a case of the blind leading the blind.

Xbox fans deserve better.

It's almost like there are thinking, hey, we are already the bad guys now, let's put all the rest of the bad stuff out ... In a few months, everything is back to normal and all is forgotten ...

I have so many points but i cant use them. The was never an xbox related exchange for my region... Not even xbox gift card.

@NEStalgia I don't remember 2021 being like that at all. It was the year Phil told us they bought Bethesda to bring quality exclusives to Xbox, and I still believe that. In fact it's undeniable given the internal emails we saw during the FTC trial.

Microsoft's marketing has been trash for ages, the few quality exclusives they do launch come and go like a fart in the wind (RIP Gears Tactics), but I don't remember the marketing on Xbox changing drastically until the EU, CMA, and FTC started tightening the screws.

You're right, I can't math. I'm American. 🤣 Stupid January always changing the year like an Xbox executive...

Yeah it was Sept 2020 to January 202-2! That the one year they we're hyping console. It was 2022 that they abandoned most mentions of anything console and were all about cloud cloud cloud.

It was the year after that that abk happened.

Regardless of how you name years in inferior calendar systems to the superior NESian calendar where years have 15 months, they started ignoring series xa little over a year past launch and turned entirely toward cloud before abk when they also started ignoring cloud too.

@Jenkinss actually now that I think about it more. It was Halo. The Challenger-esqe launch of Halo Infinite is the day Series X burned up in reentry. Within months they ignored it and focused on cloud (mobile)

@Pac_Bot It seemed rather clear to me. MS sent the notification to multiple points of contact (Xbox console, email, etc.). There was even an included link to other point redemption options. Insiders, game sites, and YTbers jump the gun on every bit of news or rumor, releasing leaks and sparking confusion for profit.

Game Pass has been absurdly cheap considering what you get and the efficacy of reward points. I converted about 3 years of XBLive to Ultimate, have been on pure rewards point for year after that period ended, and my membership won't expire until Nov. 27, 2026 (add climbing). The service has to be paid for somehow.