Play Halo 4 for six hours every day this month and receive £5.10

Microsoft has announced its Halo 4 Combat Tour promotion that rewards players real money just for playing Halo 4. It sounds exciting until you realise that you need to play the game for 140 hours in the remainder of November - that's over six hours a day - to receive 600 MS Points i.e. £5.10.

To be fair, there are lower reward tiers. Playing for 35 hours - a far more reasonable amount that many are likely to play anyway - will result in 100 free MS Points, which breaks down to £0.85. And 70 hours rewards players with 300 MS Points (£2.55).

The promotion also rewards players who buy Halo-based goods on XBLA. Purchasing 1500 MS Points (£12.75) worth of content rewards players with 100 MS Points (£0.85) back, and spending double that rewards 200 Points (£1.70).

Oh, and reading the fine print reveals that Microsoft is only giving out a maximum of 10,000,000 Microsoft Points (£85,000) on a first-come, first-serve basis. That's only enough for the first 100,000 players to achieve the lower-tier £0.85 reward, so ostensibly one could put in all this time and still not reap the benefits.

Between this and Microsoft's £0.17 birthday rewards, it sure does know how to spoil us.