People keep mentioning this Microsoft rewards thing but nobody can explain how it actually works or what you have to do?
What's the deal with that?
Umm, maybe because you never asked? There's a reddit dedicated to it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftRewards/
But I will write it down for you. It sounds like a lot but actually isn't once you have the routine down.
Subscribe to the MS rewards program (
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards) with linking your MS account and that's it, you earn MS rewards by buying your games, movies and TV-shows digitally through the store (MS Store or the store on your Xbox). Receive 40 MS Reward points for every dollar you spend (it's called 'Shop to earn' in your rewards dashboard). If you have Game Pass, do the rewards quests (
https://www.trueachievements.com/n43184/xbox-game-pass-quests-guide) in the Xbox Game Pass app on your smartphone that change every week, sometimes they give you links to games/movies in the store in the rewards app on your Xbox that earn you 5 points for doing that they change daily/weekly. Theres a daily reward of 50 points for earning an achievement in a game. There are monthly so called punchcard offers like buy three movies this month over 4 bucks each, that will net you 2500 reward points for instance I almost always complete them every month as I'm a huge movie buff and buy titles I don't necessarily want in phisycal form, digitaly. There's now a punchcard offer where buying the new Tony Hawk remake nets you 4000 reward points. Or spent 40 bucks on gamerflicks earn 4000 points if thats your thing. In the US you earn extra points when using the Bing browser daily on your PC or smartphone, the search daily offers you points.
I accumulate a lot of points by simply doing what I'm already doing, buying stuff from the store and doing the quests in the rewards-app on my Xbox and Game Pass app on my smartphone, I rarely buy full price to be honest, Xbox has new deals every Tuesday for their Gold members – games for sure and TV&Movies depends in the US always but other regions differ I heard – and I weekly spend my money in their store, there's always something on sale that I like. This way I get good deals on digital movies and TV shows and also earn MS reward points.
You can redeem those points for Xbox or Microsoft giftcards or Game Pass Ultimate. I basically haven't paid for Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass in years, 3 months of Game Pass Ultimate costs 35000 reward points or if you'd like a 10 bucks giftcard it's 9300 points (If you're a level 2 rewards member, which is quite easy to maintain to be honest). I earn over 140.000 reward points a year so that's basically free Game Pass Ultimate for me and many other members.