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: new xbox
According to Major Nelson, Xbox Live hit a record last week, with 2 million concurrent users on at one time, thanks mainly to the blockbuster that is Modern Warfare 2.
Says Major Nelson’s Tweet: “We just hit a new #XboxLIVE record: Over TWO MILLION people connected to the service at once.”
The previous record was slightly over 1.5 million, when the New Xbox Expierience (NXE) dashboard update was released last year.
Modern Warfare 2 is said to have shattered launch records for games, selling 4.7 million copies in the UK and the US in just its first day of release, netting $310 million.
Result for: new xbox
In a recent interview, John Carmack of id Software, touched briefly on the next generation of gaming systems that will replace the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. The interview, with Polish site CD-Action, is primarily about id Software’s upcoming shooter Rage, but it is the few words he dedicated to the next-generation of gaming that had caught the interview in tech site’s radar.
“The whole jockeying for who’s gonna release next gen console first is very interesting and really divorced from the technical side of things. Whether Sony wants to try and jump the gun to, you know, to prevent the same kind of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible, you know, we’d like to see it be quite a few more years before a next-gen console comes out, but I suspect someone will wind up shipping something earlier rather than later,” Carmack says.
So from his own observation, it’s clear that it is only based on what he thinks might happen and that there is nothing to suggest that PS4 is in-bound in the near-future (relative to console’s life-time), but it does hit on something. The Xbox 360 had a year on the market over the PS3, and its not hard to see that this extra time came as something of an advantage in terms of unit sales - arguably not in terms of hardware failures.
In the previous generation, Microsoft was late to the game with the original Xbox console too, but there were many other reasons why it didn’t gain more ground on the PS2 than it did to take additionally into account. The question remains however just how much each company’s intention to beat the other to the market next time will affect the duration of the current generation.
