Microsoft has unveiled some more details today at CES about the Xbox Game Room, the company’s new Xbox Live service.
The service will provide a “place to relive the glory days of arcade games” and that it will grow to include “over 1000″ retro titles by 2012.
Your Xbox avatars will also get a “mini home” at the Arcade, with a customizable room.
Most interesting is the pay structure, which will be either 40 MS points for a single play (like at an arcade with quarters) or 240-400 points to own it.
The service should be available in the Spring.
Result for: avatars
According to Major Nelson, sales on Xbox Live Arcade have nearly tripled in the weeks following the introduction of the New Xbox Experience dashboard revamp.
Being updated to include in-game Avatars spurred UNO sales 650 percent in its first day after the NXE update.
For the first week following the launch, movie downloads were up 49 percent and TV episode downloads were up 30 percent.
The current Live service now has over 30,000 movies, TV episodes, and music videos available from 45 content partners.
Result for: avatars
According to “sources” cited by MTV News, Microsoft has been developing a Wiimote-like controller for the Xbox 360 for 9 months and plans to release it at some point this year.
The new 360 controller will be similarly shaped to the Wiimote and will have “a speaker, microphone, four LED lights, A/B/X/Y face buttons, an analogue stick and an underside trigger.”
Gameplay would be like “Halo, Gears and Forza in waggle form”, but there seems to be some issues with the development of the controller so far. Developers are split at Microsoft with some wanting it to be as Wii-like as possible while others want the controller to be more feature rich. If the controller is exactly like the Wiimote, games can be ported from the Wii, argues the first set of developers.
The source also notes that Microsoft is working on Mii-like avatars and that the software is being created by Rare.
The rough sketch by the source looks like this:
