Yeah I remember the days when we could get 3 years of Ultimate for a total price of £75 to £80ish. Now the cheapest it gets is that much but for only one year.
Poll: *** Xbox Series X|S - General Discussion Thread ***
- Thread starter ic1male
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Not sure what its like points wise in the UK but in NZ we can get Game Pass Ultimate for 12000 points - essentially completing the daily set on xbox plus the bing rewards nets me ~11-13K per month so I generally, perhaps with a wee on sale purchase, get GPU for nowt... but it does rely on the daily rigeur of completing the fairly easy activities.
Yup, MS have made it really difficult to get a good discount on Game Pass over the last 18 months or so. The MS Reward scheme is crippled and sub prices have increased twice over that period. I still have 16 months left but probably won't renew after that point - prefer buying my games on Steam and using sales / key sites it's not really any more expensive than maintaining a Game Pass subscription. I may still get the odd occasional month if Xbox has a purple patch of releases.
About the same here in the UK, but it's a full time job trying to nickle and dime those 11-12k points each month. Just 18 months ago I could easily get approx. 25K points per month. I've stopped doing the MS Rewards scheme now - just not worth it.
maybe, we've never had it good here... so perhaps I'm used to the slog but I use the bing app to get all the daily rewards from that and then just run a game pass game on geforce now and the console to get the rest - generally leave the game running for 15 mins on geforce now checking at about 8 mins to avoid the timeout and then do my gaming on the console.
Yeah, used to do all of that ... but it became a chore. I ended up "playing" games to earn MS Reward points rather than just having fun. Same with earning points via Bing ... so many obstacles were put in place the last 18 months.
Soldato
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So the current best deal is still to buy 12 months of Game Pass Core and convert it at 2:1 ratio? So 12 months Core is £39.99 which gives 6 months Ultimate making it £6.67 pm? I feel like I've missed something.
If you search on a certain deals website that is hot and for the uk, you'll see a deal that's labelled...
13 Months Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Membership via Gift Cards | £5.53 p/m | New / Lapsed Subscribers | See OP for Instructions
It's a bit involved but then so was the method that I did last autumn by purchasing 12 months of India Ultimate for about £80ish.
Soldato
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Thanks I'll take a look. I didn't realise it was now £15pm as standard. That's pretty hard to justify, for me anyway.
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They removed the requirement to play a specific named game per week/month and so I just fire up whatever small 200mb indie game that's currently on game pass and leave that to idle on the console for 15mins. Also fire up MS "Solitaire and Casual Games" on the PC and idle that too at the same time. The desktop and mobile searches I can get done in about 20mins whilst listening to some music or podcasts.
I started doing this during the summer of 2020. By summer of 2023 I had collected enough points to convert to £400 to put towards a Series X that were finally back in stock at the time. Currently have about 420k of points since then. The 1tb expansion never seems to come back in stock on the MS site which is a shame so I may eventually have to accept a lower conversion rate and get it from Amazon instead.
I've bailed from the Xbox ecosystem ... sold my Series X at the end of last year. But prior to that I bought the 1 TB expansion card, an Elite 2 controller and almost all my games via Reward points. It was good while it lasted ...
Nowadays I'm back to PC / Steam as my main platform with PS5 Pro ( and Switch 2 ) on the side.
Fair play. I've had an Xbox Live membership since just before COD4 arrived in the 360 days. Then I picked up PS+ for the PS3 a few months after that launched. Kept the membership going until the start of this month and didn't renew. I hadn't turned on my PS4 Pro in years and I still had all this cheap PS+ that I kept buying from Days of Play discount every year.
I've got a 4090 based PC and my gaming is mostly split between that and the Series X. When I need to go portable I've got the Deck and Switch.
This is me! Sold the Series X in June last year. With a 1TB expansion card, but not an Elite 2 controller.
I've said it before, but I've lost all faith in Microsoft and have zero interest in this new Windows 11 'console' that's coming. I want Xbox exclusives and killer hardware. Rewards was fantastic too, I only did the basic searches before they 'nerfed that.
It's the exclusives or "killer apps" I want from Xbox. Other than the Forza Horizon franchise they haven't delivered on that front for at least a decade. Hopefully they can get back to form, but I have my doubts they ever will given the studio layoffs and axing of certain titles eg. Perfect dark.
Yep. I think as a publisher they still will produce some interesting games outside of the annual Live Service CoD, WoW etc. Maybe the odd low budget game, or some games based on their big IP (new Fallout etc.).
I think Fable is going to the acid test - if that flops Microsoft Gaming Studios could be in the doldrums for years ( outwith the yearly rehashes of CoD etc which i have zero interest in ).
I suspect they will mirror the industry in that it's big IP and existing Live Services mostly from now on. Hence the Zenimax Online Studios new-MMO getting cancelled for a new Fallout instead. I imagine Fable will fall into the Game Pass content, but if it doesn't sell that well they'll move on from it. Similarly to yourself I have no interest in the Activision Blizzard stuff, but do still like some of the Bethesda/Zenimax games. Also Obsidian and a few others are of interest. But I'm buying those games on Steam, or PlayStation. Not The Windows Store/Xbox App.
I know that you can only use MS credit against a UK account on the MS UK store. Any UK credit won't be available on any other MS foreign store.
The support link does mention that you might need to change regions to redeem some codes, but not sure if you can redeem Euro gift cards against a UK account.
I would also hazard a guess that if you redeemed Euro's against a similar Euro region, that the credit might only appear against that same MS region store.
Xbox Support
support.xbox.com
Not at launch, maybe in the future.