VideoGame_Discussion

From what I read, the Gold to GP deal is still available. Since most of us have already taken advantage that $1 deal, the second best option is to let your Gold expire, buy up to 3 years of Gold, then redeem the Gold, purchase 1 month of GP for like $15 and the 3 years will convert to GP.
So I think the $1 went away likely bc most folks weren't able to use it anyhow. Basically most ppl who wanted to try GP already have. If they take away the convert Gold to GP deal, that will stink. But by the time I'm looking to re-up via that trick they could adjust it as well.

Slickriven wrote:

If they're finally going to fix this, I can't envision that they'll leave it open for $15 vs $1. It's time to close the loophole, we've all enjoyed this perk and it was clearly to attract people to the the platform and hopefully stick with it. Still, it will clearly cause many to bail as well.

I definitely think we're about to see the introduction of the Family Plan for USA to help counter the bad news.

I haven't yet heard anything internally on the matter, so this is just speculation. I'm chatting with some of my colleagues, and no one has any insight here as sadly, we're very disconnected from the Xbox division. I gotta make more friends over there.

Yeah, I agree with that thought @MrBean I was only repeating what I read from another article, could certainly be incorrect. Like I said, by the time I'm looking to renew again things could be pretty different. Granted right now I'm not thrilled with the games on there. I've avoided complaining about this before and there still are games I could get into, but for the first time since I've been a sub, the selection is letting me down a little. For whatever reason not much is calling out to me and the smaller filler stuff (i.e. indie games) that I've often gone to are maybe lacking the most, oh well I've for sure got my $$$'s worth.

Loss leaders. That free crack rock better bring em back to the playground.

Archer wrote:

This only happens if you have any kind of active subscription. If you let everything lapse, Gold/GPU/EA etc., the full conversion works. I helped my brother set this up not too long ago, had his GPU fully expire, bought 3 discounted Gold years for $50 each, then paid the 1 month of GPU, $15, to upgrade. All in $165 for 3 years of GPU .

From what I can see at least so far, this announcement does not effect the conversion deal at all, could change at some point though.

Archer wrote:

Create a second profile for it. You can still play games off different profiles, right?

To do the Gold to GP deal you have to let your current Gold, if it had GP, expire. Only has to be inactive for a single day, then the conversation would work. At least it did for me around 8 months ago.

Slickriven wrote:

Correct you have to let it expire, buy gold separately then do the conversion. Make sure you're buying gold on cdkeys or another similar site to get the best rate available.
Alternatively you could buy MS money at a discount using Raise and go from there.
That's what i'm doing with PS Plus as i missed all the serious discounts a couple months ago.

Ever since they added GPU to the monthly auto redeem, I just use my rewards points to cover my membership. 1-2 minutes of clicking around each day gives me more than enough points to cover the 10k-ish cost.

SwiftJAB wrote:

This seems to be the way to do it. At first I though it was going to take too much time to keep up. But spending ~10 minutes a day you can earn enough to get far more than you need to auto redeem. You could actually over two months get ahead of it and have enough to auto redeem two months (or almost). Then giving yourself leeway to not have to do it every single day after that. Just enough to keep topping up to make sure you had enough for the next month.

I only had 9K points the other day. I just earned enough in two days to get 5K (I hadn't done anything all month to earn, so I had a lot to do that earned points). But since its 4 days till the end of the month I couldn't setup the auto. So I paid 12K for one month. I now have 2k points. I should be able to setup my auto redeem in 10-12 days. And then get enough the rest of April to have enough to be close again. Meaning in May I wont have to do much to get back to the 10,500 for auto redeem. I wish I would have been doing this all along. ~10 minutes a day really isn't bad. Doing the searches every day is the biggest chore. I could go much faster if I wasn't trying to do actual searches. If you just randomly type nonsense you can probably do it in one minute.

How do you guys get these points? Just the daily challenges? I've honestly never paid attention to it.

I'm still so reliant on Google and rarely touch Bing. Although, I do use Bing for some work stuff as it enables us to crawl all of our internal resources too which is crazy cool!

MrBean wrote:

That and lot of different other stuff.
I recommend joining r/MicrosoftRewards

https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftRewards/comments...

Wow! That's... A lot of work, haha, but damn.

Yeah. I'm not doing anywhere near all that crap. And still earning a decent chunk. I'll earn more than enough to get 10,500 a month to cover GPU.

I'm just doing the daily stuff, the extra stuff on the rewards dashboard (extra activities). Like the quizzes and the news clicks and that stuff. The simple quick stuff. And the searches. But not the mobile, that is too much. Just PC/Bing and Edge/Bing searches. Yes they are two different things. You only get 20 a day for Edge searches. And 150 a day from another browser using bing. The stuff on the xbox rewards app and the gamepass things like "play a gamepass game 3 days this week". Or "earn 12 daily and 8 weekly". You find those in the gamepass app on xbox itself. And punch cards that don't require me to spend money.

Although today I did buy a game to earn 2500 points, plus the 20 points per dollar on the amount spent (for being level 2 rewards and having GPU). They have a punch card for spending $50 on certain games/movies. And one of the games I want to play (Hogwarts). Even though I was going to wait for this to come down in price or end up on GP. I figured why not. 2500 to complete that punch card. And 1,399 points for the purchase itself. So 3,899 points for buying a game I wanted to play anyways. But normally I wont be doing the punch cards that require a purchase.

And if you break down the daily, that is 900 points a month. The searches is 5100 a month (minus mobile). That is 6000 a month just in those. If you throw in the random stuff on extra activities on the rewards website you should get about 2000 a month. So you are now at 8000 for the month. Then the gamepass quest rewards is about 1000 a month as well. You are now at 9,000 for the month. And the xbox rewards app should have about 1500-2000 a month as well. You are now at 10,500-11,000 for the month. Without having to do all that extra crap in that link I posted. And you have exactly what you need.

But if you did all (or any) that crap for one month, you'd get way ahead and like I said in that other post. Reduce what you need going forward each month.

Realistically to just cover GPU to get the 10,500, you only need to spend 5-10 minutes a day.
Maybe 20 minutes if you are going after a gamepass quests where it requires you to do something specific in a certain game. Like the current kill 28 enemies in Outriders. I didn't even install this. I just streamed it using the cloud option and started a new game. Took me about 15-18 minutes to get the kills. Had to get through the opening crap which took most of the time. That was worth 250 rewards points. And then another 5 points for staring Hellbade and turning it off. Took 20 seconds.

If you are not familiar with the gamepass quests here is what I mean:
https://www.trueachievements.com/xbox-quests

There are also daily ones. But those are just, play a game pass game. Earn an achievement in a gamepass game. They are super easy to get. And all I have been using to get rewards for ever. I never used the bing stuff before the other day.

Called it. Family plan inbound.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/xbox-game-p...

In limited regions currently. According to the support article, here's how they treat accounts with an existing GPU membership:

Your time will migrate with you to the new plan on a fixed ratio; for example, a month of Game Pass Ultimate will be worth 18 days of Friends & Family. After your converted time runs out, it renews at the listed price.
However, the people you invite to share your membership with cannot convert their existing time. Before joining a group, a group member will need to cancel their existing subscriptions or wait for their existing subscriptions to expire.

I don't see a price listed.

Rumored at $40 a month for 6 people.

Actually just found this

https://twitter.com/Jawmuncher/status/164160056713...

So GPU shares inbound then I guess. Where each member only pays $7.15 a month. Pain in the ass to collect the money from 5 people every month though. Would seem like a big hassle to me. Considering there are ways to get it at the same discount in multiple month chunks. Or for free using rewards points.

Archer wrote:

It'd be crazy for them not to have an annual plan. Odd that they're starting this way, but have to assume it'll change.

MrBean wrote:

There is no annual plan for GP at all anymore. They ended a couple years ago. You can only do 1, 3 or 6 months. And I doubt they allow anything more than a single month sub for this friends and family plan.

EDIT: looks like they ended the 6 month as well. I can't find that anymore either. I'm only finding 1 and 3 months.
EDIT 2: Just found a 6 month at target, but its digital. So they probably send you two 3 month codes. But its regular GP and not ultimate.

@Archer didn't realize they stopped the 12 month. Looks like they still have it on our employee store internally.