The Xbox One Digital Future on a Budget

I’ve written quite a bit about how digital downloads aren’t quite living up to their potential on consoles. My words, however, don’t change the fact that quite a few gamers — especially those on the Xbox One — really want to embrace that all-digital future, even if it costs an extra couple of bucks.

Well, I’m not going to just stand idly by and let my fellow gamers pay full retail price for a digital game. Heck no. I have a few tricks of my sleeve that can at least help knock $5-$15 off of that $60 price tag. It’s not Steam, but it’s at least a bit easier on the wallet.

Xbox Gift Card Sales

These happen quite a bit if you know where to look. Past sales have happened at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. Microsoft even ran a promotion a month or two back that gave gamers an extra $5 for every $15 Xbox Gift Card they purchased, and NewEgg had a crazy deal that sold $60 of Xbox credit for $40. A good place to watch for these deals is the Cheap Ass Gamer forum, as well as the GameDeals subreddit.

CrazyGameTime

There is absolutely no reason you should pay the $60 in the Xbox Store. An online shop called CrazyGameTime will, at its maximum, charge you $53.99 for $60 worth of Xbox store credit. And here’s a little trick — if you add two $30 cards to your shopping cart, you can use coupon code “BUY2” to shave another few bucks off, bringing your total to $51.28. And that is untaxed, so in Pennsylvania, you’d actually save $12.31.

Xbox Rewards

Using Microsoft’s Xbox Rewards program, your gaming (and buying) can actually earn you money, which you can then turn into Xbox store credit. Accumulating 5,000 points is the same as racking up $5, and right now, you can actually gain 5,000 points every time you spend at least $60 on a combination of games and video. There are other ways to earn points, too, such as taking small surveys.

Bing Rewards

If you can deal with using Bing on your PC and Bing on your mobile device, you can sign up for Bing Rewards and have the chance to earn 25 points per day. You can pick up a $5 Xbox card for every 500 points you accumulate, so if you’re a diligent searcher, you can easily earn $15 in credit every two months or so. Combine that with some of the other deals, and it’s quite possible to drop a game down from its $60 starting price to something much, much more reasonable.

Have some additional tips or tricks? Leave us a comment below!