It's that time again Xbox Imperials! I'm going to run another informal comment contest for my latest review:

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/467562/greedfall-the-dying-world-xs/

Rules are simple: make a comment to be entered into a lotto (not counting any that have to be moderated). Max amount of lotto entries is one.

1st place: Xbox, Steam, or PS5 code for GreedFall: The Dying World Digital Deluxe

2nd place: 1 year of VGChartz Bronze

Deadline to enter will be 4/17/26 @ 11:59 EST

Cool the best special edition of the OG XBox is still the green Mountain Dew one and its pretty rare also since they only made 5100 of them.

Starting from May:

Also:

We've already heard a lot about how new Xbox boss Asha Sharma seemingly wants to make a bunch of changes at Xbox, including ditching the "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign and reducing prices for Xbox Game Pass, but behind the scenes, it sounds like she's very keen to improve Xbox's "platform foundations" as well.

In a leaked memo to employees that was shared by The Verge yesterday, Sharma outlined that "deeper investment" is required in this area, suggesting that some of Xbox's infrastructure makes it hard to experiment, learn, and distribute at both speed and quality. Also, from a player standpoint, she says that too many of the front-end Xbox features aren't "first-class", pointing to the likes of "discovery, relevance, and social".

Here's an excerpt from the memo:

"It’s clear that our ambitions require deeper investment in the Xbox platform foundations than we’ve made before. Today we operate across dozens of surfaces, pipelines, and release models without a shared code repository or common data foundation. As a result, quality and speed too often depends on heroics instead of systems. We also lack consistent infrastructure for experimentation, attribution, and learning, making it harder to know what’s working and improve quickly. On the product side, our front end is a set of experiences built at different times, where discovery, relevance, and social are not first-class, and players have to work to find what to do next or who to play with."

In a follow-up, The Verge says that Sharma mentions PC as part of this as well, noting how she wants Xbox PC users to switch between games and devices without as much "friction" as they have to deal with today.

Clearly, the new Xbox boss believes that improvements need to be made behind-the-scenes to operate in a more efficient manner going forward, and it's nice to hear that the Xbox dashboard experience will likely continue to evolve as a result of that — her mention of "discovery, relevance, and social" not being "first-class" certainly suggests as such.

Who knows exactly what'll come of this, but it sounds like major changes are afoot behind the scenes at Xbox!

From my experience Microsoft Rewards has only been nerfed in the many years I've been using it. Up to 7x more points sounds good, but in reality it might not be if they lower the base amount of points one can earn per day. 

In the US, right now you can earn 150 points for Bing searches on PC and another 100 points on mobile. The daily set is another 30 to 50 points per day. Plus the little bit more you can earn playing Game Pass games on Xbox and PC.

1 month of Game Pass Ultimate used to cost 12,000 points, but since they changed the price to $30/month they removed Game Pass as an option in Rewards. I do hope they bring it back even if they charge more points for it.

The points went down and up for me but the progress went slower. It has become more work but I am glad that they got rid of the achievement a day requirement.

The achievement a day one was rather annoying. At the time I wanna say I slowly went through Brotato trying to get just one achievement per day.

I managed to get a Series S for £99 + reward point vouchers shortly after launch which was cool considering I just had to open an app each day that did the bing searches for me :) I've not really done anything with them since and managed to build up 58k points whatever that is worth but it does feel good to get freebies and point rebates on your purchases.

I was able to earn more than enough MS Points each month (People in the US are able to earn more daily points with Bing searches) to keep my Game Pass Ultimate maxed out at 3 years and earn several thousand on top of that. At the time it was just 12K MS Points for 1 month of Ultimate. Since they removed that I now need to redeem an Xbox gift card which is 100K MS Points for $100. At $30 per month now for Ultimate that is enough for just 3 months and a bit extra. 

At this point I am continuing to earn MS Points, however, I've stopped redeeming my points for the Xbox Gift cards and am letting the total grow. Once my 3 years runs out I will decide what I will do. If it still exists probably just switch to PC Game Pass as that is much cheaper and still has day one games.

I am not complaining. I think MS Rewards has been very generous. I've saved a ton of money not having to pay for Ultimate and using other points on controllers, games, and DLC.

The new additions, which weren't previously confirmed by Microsoft, begin dropping on Tuesday, April 28, with Dont Nod's new sci-fi adventure Aphelion for Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers. This is followed by action-packed first-person shooter Trepang2 on Wednesday, April 29, for Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass. Seeing out the month, we have TerraTech Legion, Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, and friendslop multiplayer title Sledding Game sliding into Ultimate and PC Game Pass on Thursday, April 30.

Finally, on Tuesday, May 5, the next Final Fantasy remaster drops into Game Pass with Final Fantasy V joining Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass. Here is the full list of games coming to Game Pass soon:

New games joining Xbox Game Pass in April 2026 (Wave 2)

• April 21 — Little Rocket Lab (Cloud, Console, PC) Game Pass Premium
• April 21 — Sopa: Tale of the Stolen Potato (Cloud, Console, Handheld, PC) Game Pass Premium
• April 21 — Vampire Crawlers (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, Handheld, PC) Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• April 23 — Kiln (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, Handheld, PC) Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• April 28 — Aphelion (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, Handheld, PC) Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• April 29 — Trepang2 (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, PC) Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, and PC Game Pass
• April 30 — Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era (PC) Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• April 30 — Sledding Game (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, PC) Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• April 30 — TerraTech Legion (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, PC) Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• May 5 — FINAL FANTASY V (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, PC) Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass

Maybe the new tier could fit the gap and points better whatever it turns out to be but keeping Ultimate up for free is certainly a great feat.