If you’re an Xbox owner who’s been on the fence about buying something new from the Microsoft Store, you might want to check your account’s inbox. Microsoft has started up another round of its store credit giveaways this week and seems to be depositing $5 into people’s accounts to use on games or other digital products you may want to purchase. There’s been no indication yet as to when this promotion might end, but we do already know that the credit has an expiration date, so don’t sit on the credit for too long if you’re one of the lucky recipients.
News of these $5 giveaways was shared on social media this week by those who received the funds and wanted to alert others that they too might have that money waiting for them in their accounts. One of the tweets which received a retweet from Wario64 included the same text used in other posts where people thanked Xbox for the funds that came out of nowhere.
Check your Xbox messages, Microsoft is giving another round of free gift card money (expires June 30th) https://t.co/Hgww71BIzQ
— Wario64 (@Wario64) May 26, 2022
I finally won the $5 lottery:)
Thanks @xbox ! pic.twitter.com/C3WtB25abc— JohnSnow117 🔜 XboxFanfestLA (@Xbox_SUPERFAN) May 26, 2022
This isn’t the first time Xbox has done this sort of thing, and it likely won’t be the last, but like previous times, there’s really no indication as to what circumstances are in place to govern who gets the $5 bonus and who doesn’t. Is it only select Xbox Live Gold subscribers, select Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, or is it more random than that? There doesn’t appear to be any way to tell, but $5 is small enough of an amount that it’s not like Xbox is leaving people out by buying full games for others.
Of the messages we’ve seen on social media where people announced that they’d received the funds, many of them appear to have been posted on May 26th, so it looks like that was the start of this latest giveaway which might mean that if you didn’t get one then, you may not get one. While specifics about that are still uncertain, we do know that the credit itself has an expiration date. The messages received from Xbox indicated that the credit would expire on June 30th which means you’ll have just over a month to spend the $5 if it’s received.