I’m a fan of Microsoft’s Rewards program. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a program where you can earn points for doing things like answering quizes, using Bing to search, or more interestingly to me, playing Xbox Game Pass games. A point is worth a tiny amount; I tend to wait until I have 95,000 points to redeem them for a $100 gift card, meaning a single point is worth about a tenth of a cent. Seems not worth the bother, right? But they do add up and about twice a year I’m able to cash in a $100 card, plus I find the gamification of the system kind of mindless fun.

In terms of Game Pass rewards, most recently there were Daily, Weekly and Monthly tasks to complete. The Daily tasks were always “Play a Game Pass Game” and “Earn an Achievement in a Game Pass Game.” The first was trivial (it popped as soon as you opened a Game Pass title), the second was variable depending on what you were playing. The Weekly tasks were things like “Play 3 different Game Pass games” and “Complete 3 Daily tasks.” The Monthly tasks were where the big rewards were and they were basically an accumulation of the Daily and Weeklies, with the highest one rewarding 1000 points for doing 8 Weekly tasks and X Daily tasks, where X was a number around 45. This meant that you HAD to earn an Achievement in a Game Pass game once a day for about half the days of the month.

What this led to, at least in OCD folks like me, was “hoarding” Achievements. If I was playing a Game Pass game and I earned an Achievement I’d IMMEDIATELY stop playing the game for the day so I didn’t unlock another Achievement which ‘wouldn’t count’ for anything. I appreciate and admit this was entirely a “me” issue but based on conversations in the Microsoft Rewards reddit, I wasn’t the only one who did this.

Today all that ends. All the details are on Xbox Wire but the gist of it is, rewards based on Achievements are gone; all tasks will be based on just playing games. Good news for me. That said, you now have to spend 15 minutes in a game for it to count, so no more hitting the title screen and quitting, though I guess you could sit at the title screen for 15 minutes and that would work. There also seems to be a big focus on ‘streaks’ of playing 5 days a week, each week. Lastly there is a monthly “Game Pass 4 Pack” and “Game Pass 8 Pack” task which rewards us for playing 4 or 8 different Game Pass games, respectively.

And then the big news is, there are now equivalent rewards for PC gamers. Same rules seem to apply only now you’ll be playing on PC rather than on console.

As of today I am seeing these tasks on the Xbox app on my phone:

Play a PC game -> 10 points
Weekly PC bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days
Play a game on console -> 10 points
Weekly console bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days

In the name of science I snuck off from work and played Borderlands Game of the Year edition on the Xbox for 20 minutes. This is NOT a Game Pass game but it counted for “Play a game on console” so it seems these do not have to be Game Pass titles. (Though I imagine in the case of PC it’ll have to be a game played via the Xbox app which for most of us means a Game Pass title.)

As a Game Pass Ultimate member I also have:

Play a Game Pass Game -> 10 points

Game Pass Monthly 4-pack -> 50 points
Game Pass Monthly 8-pack -> 350 points

Then there are streak bonuses.

Days 1-4 -> no bonus
Day 5 -> +40 point
Day 6 -> +20 points
Day 7 -> +40 points

These last numbers increase as you maintain your streak from week to week.

Week 2 -> x2 bonus
Week 3 -> x3 bonus
Week 4 & beyond -> x4 bonus

OK now the caveat is, this is a brand new system and I haven’t actually tested any of it yet. I’ll update the post if I find I’ve made any mistakes or if I’ve missed anything.

I haven’t done the math but I’m guessing there are fewer points to earn over the old system since Microsoft continues to decrease Rewards points over time, but for me personally I am super happy to see the end of tasks based on earning achievements. But we’ll see how it goes!