Microsoft Rewards Program Can Give You Free Xbox Games and More

Written by Brandon Hofer on December 05, 2019

News: If you are a regular user of Microsoft’s app you can earn free games and we tell you how to do that here.

For a little while now Microsoft has had a rewards program in place not only for Xbox gamers but for everyone that uses Microsoft’s products. If you stay on top of the program and constantly accrue points you can get a good amount of stuff for free, or at least at reduced prices. You can get points for doing something as simple as using Bing for your searches instead of Google to completing Game Pass quests on your Xbox One. I have had friends pay for their Xbox Live Gold membership and/or their Game Pass membership with reward points, effectively making those services free for them to use. Over the recent Thanksgiving holiday, I had enough reward points to redeem for a $50 Xbox gift card which I used to purchase a plethora of titles during their Black Friday sale. How is this done though? There are a number of different ways to achieve this which we have outlined below.

Game Pass Quests

There are three different types of Game Pass Quests for you to work on. These are the daily, weekly, and monthly quests respectively.

Daily Quests

There are daily quests with new quests available, however, each quest only lasts 24 hours. So if you see a daily quest on Monday, it will not be available for you on Tuesday. The good news here though is the daily quests are really easy and should only take a moment or two for you to complete. The daily quests are usually something along the lines of launching a game that is currently in the Game Pass program and launching the Game Pass mobile app on your phone. Each of those quests is worth 15 reward points, so in a matter of moments, you can get a quick 30 points every day.

Weekly Quests

The weekly quests are a bit more involved and you have one week to complete them. An example of a current quest right now is “Co-op Carnage”. This quest wants you to “Rack up 25 kills in multiplayer” in the Master Chief Collection. It doesn’t matter whether it is multiplayer from Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST, or Reach...it just has to be within the MCC. Once you get 25 kills in that multiplayer suite you will earn 75 Reward points. So now if you do that plus those two really easy daily quests, you have now earned over 100 reward points. There is also another current quest for the game “Human Fall Flat”. If you travel 10 meters in a dumpster in that game you will earn 75 reward points. There are also quests that build off each other. For example, there is a weekly quest to complete 4 daily quests in a week. If you do that you will earn 25 reward points, in addition to the points you earned for completing those daily quests. As the name suggests these quests are only available for a week and they do show you the date(s) these quests expire so you aren’t left guessing. As you can begin to see, you can earn a lot of reward points with Microsoft’s program and we are just getting warmed up.

Monthly Quests

These are similar to the daily and weekly quests. Some of them are more involved and some of them build on the smaller quests. There is currently a “Quest Completionist” quest where you will receive 1,000 reward points for completing 45 daily and 15 weekly quests over the past month. This quest expires on December 17 so if you haven’t started it by now it is too late to get it but you can kind of understand why you want to try and keep up with these different quests. There are some easier quests available too, such as getting an achievement in Sea of Thieves or hunting two large monsters in Monster Hunter. Additionally, if you score 25 kills in the Endless mode of Super Hot you will earn 100 reward points.

Once you complete a quest, regardless of whether it is daily, weekly, or monthly, you want to “turn in” your quests, and then you will get the rewards you are owed. To check it out for yourself and get to the area where you can see these quests, check out the video below.

Microsoft Rewards App

In addition to the Game Pass quests I mentioned above, you will want to download the Microsoft Rewards app on Xbox One. Launch the app and you will be greeted with a bunch of different quests to complete and reward points to earn.

When you first start up the app you should immediately notice the “Rewards Weekly Set”. This is a set of quests you want to do every week. For this week it wanted me to boot up Mixer once, launch the reward app on three separate days throughout the week, and earn 200 points by searching for things on the web using Bing. If you do this weekly set on a consistent basis you can really earn some points. For example, I received 10 points for booting up Mixer, 40 points for launching the reward app on three separate days, and 50 reward points for earning 200 points by using Bing. In addition to that, I receive 100 reward points for completing the weekly set and since I’m on a 4-week streak, I received an additional 250 reward points. My next bonus will be once I hit a 7-week streak, at which point I’ll receive an extra 500 reward points.

Outside of the rewards weekly set, there are a number of other things for me to do (check out the video below to see it in action). If I can get two achievements in Subnautica over the next 32 days, I’ll receive 200 reward points. Same thing with Rage 2. If I earn three achievements in ID@Xbox games over the next 32 days, I’ll receive 300 reward points. If I earn an achievement in a recently added game, I’ll earn 100 points. It should be noted that not all games are eligible for these types of quests but Microsoft makes it easy for you to click on an image to see what games you can use for these quests.

In addition to all of this, there are other really easy quests for you to do to keep your point total climbing. Earlier today, there was a quest where if I launched Mixer for a moment they would give me 5 reward points. I earned another 5 reward points for checking out the Dark Tower. You don’t have to watch it, just bring up the product listing and then back out. Same with the game Afterparty. You will get 5 reward points for clicking on the quest in this app and having it take you to the product listing.

From time to time there are also a lot of reward points you can get for picking up games. While there aren’t any of those active at the time this story was posted, a few weeks ago they gave people 6,000 reward points for buying the digital version of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. That particular “quest” only lasted about a week and there are guidelines you will want to pay attention to whenever these pop-up. Additionally, if you bought over $40 worth of games during their recent Black Friday sale, they gave you 5,000 reward points. When the Elite Series 2 controller was recently released, they gave away 15,000 reward points if you bought it within a certain window. To get these big reward points when these offers show up you often have to activate the offer. Doing that is easy enough as you just look at the quest and push a button to activate it. Activation is important though for you to get some of those bigger rewards so be sure to keep on top of things so you don’t miss out. It also needs to be noted that pre-orders rarely work for these quests. For example, with the Jedi Fallen Order reward points, you needed to have bought the game beginning November 17 and going through November 24th. If you pre-ordered the game on November 16th, you would have been ineligible for the promotion. It should also be stated that I am located in the U.S. and I don’t know if this rewards program works the same way in other countries but you should definitely do some research on it if you are not in the United States.

Microsoft Rewards - Browser Based

The third big area to earn reward points is in your browser of choice, for the most part. To do this you need to go to the address https://account.microsoft.com/rewards/. Once you do that you will see a daily set of quests to complete. There are always three of them and they are really easy. Usually, there is one where they want you to look at something, one quick pop culture quiz, and a poll. Going through all three should only take you one or two minutes and they are very easy points. I have already gone through and done it for today and going through all three earned me 50 reward points. Much like on the rewards app above, you will also get rewarded if you can keep a streak going. Right now my streak is at 21 days and I recently earned 105 reward points just for not missing any days in the last three weeks. If you have never done this before you can scroll down the page and do some other quests which will net you some nice, one-time-only reward points as well.

In addition to that daily set of tasks, you should click on “Points Breakdown” on the top right of the screen. This will show you how many points you have earned for the day by using Bing. You can earn 20 points by using Bing in the Microsoft Edge browser and doing four searches (each search earns approximately 5 points). You can earn an additional 150 points by using Bing on any browser (I usually just do this in the Microsoft Edge browser since it is open anyways but you can use whatever you want). Then there is an additional 100 points if you use Bing on your phone. The way it works the best for me is I open the Safari browser on my iPhone and use Bing to do 20 quick searches (again, each search should net you 5 points) which quickly gets me to 100 points. There is a dedicated Bing app but for some reason, the points weren’t registering properly at times so I just stick with Safari. You are obviously free to experiment as you see fit, however.

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That should be about it. As you can see you can earn a lot of Microsoft reward points fairly quickly. You also receive a discount for being active. As I mentioned above, I recently used my reward points to acquire a $50 Xbox gift card, for free. It cost me 46,000 reward points to do. If you don’t want to wait you can get a $10 gift card for around 9,600 points. You also don’t have to just stick with Microsoft. Once you have enough points to redeem for a reward you can enter sweepstakes, donate to certain charities, or get a gift card for somewhere else. For example, you can redeem your reward points for an Amazon card, a Starbucks card, an NFL shop card, and more. You can check all of this out at https://account.microsoft.com/rewards/redeem/.

Having read all of that I’m sure you feel like this rewards program is pretty overwhelming. It really is easy to use though and once you get the hang of it you will want to spend a few minutes every day racking up those rewards. You can plan ahead and work toward acquiring a $50 or $100 Xbox gift card or get rewards more often like a $5 Amazon card or whatever the case may be. This is also a great way to check out some new games you might not play otherwise and potentially get real rewards for doing so.

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If you haven’t done so, be sure to check out the videos and photos in this story to try and get some context so you can actually see what I was talking about, and then leave a comment below. If this is your introduction to Microsoft’s reward program, will you become an avid user and try to earn a lot of points?