Microsft CES 2010 roundup: 39 million Xbox 360s, Game Room, Natal coming Holiday 2010

7 January 2010

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Posted by:Josh

At Microsoft’s Consumer Electronics Show 2010 keynote address, they made some new announcements as well as discussed sales numbers and the upcoming Project NATAL.

Among the biggest new announcements is the Microsoft “Game Room”. Game Room is literally a virtual arcade where players can customize their own video arcade room or space, and then share that room with their friends, using their Avatars, by inviting them to come into their room where they can chat and play the arcade games together.

The Game Room itself and the customization that comes along with it will be a free download for either Xbox Live Arcade or Windows. With just the room, you will be able to move and arrange any arcade cabinets you have around the room, and decorate it with themes or animated icons, wallpaper, etc. from the available arcade games offered on the service. In many ways this is similar to a scaled back version of PlayStation Home.

Of course, the main draw will be the arcade games themselves and the ability to share them with friends. You can play any of your friends games for free to try them out before you purchase them for your own collection. Once you have decided to buy a particular game, you are given a few options. First off, you can play any game you want for a price of 50 cents (or 40 Microsoft Points) just as you would at a real arcade. This lets you play a single session (like a trial or demo) before you have to pay another 40 MSP to keep playing. Then if you choose to buy it, you can do so at a price of $3 (240 MSP) for a single platform (either Xbox Live Arcade or Games For Windows Live) or you can spring for the full price of $5 which will make the game playable on both platforms.

Here is a trailer for Game Room which gives you a much better idea of what the service will be like.

Regarding Windows Live, does this mean that Avatars will be coming to Windows? Microsoft didn’t clarify. The Game Room service will launch this Spring with over 30 arcade games like Centipede and Asteroids Deluxe from publishers like Intellivision, Konami, Activision and Atari. All games will support Achievements, cross-platform leaderboards, 1080p and two-players.

Beyond the new Game Room, Microsoft discussed Project NATAL, and gave it a Holiday 2010 launch window.

“Natal has to work on the existing hardware without taking too much hardware processing away from the games developers,” noting that Natal consumes between 10 to 15 percent of the Xbox’s computing power. “When we train this ‘brain’ we are telling it: this is the head, this is the shoulder. And we’re doing that over millions of frames. When it sees a new image it can tell you the probability it’s seeing a certain body part based on that historical information,” said Alex Kipman, lead developer of NATAL, in speaking to New Scientist.

You can see the developers discuss NATAL and what they expect for it in the future in this CES 2010 video.

Last but not least, Microsoft offered these new bits of info:

* Over 39 million Xbox 360’s sold worldwide. Since launch, over 500 million games have been sold generating 20-Billion dollars in sales.

* Between Christmas and New Years, Xbox LIVE experienced it’s busiest weeks ever, welcoming a new member every second and recording over 2.2. million concurrent members online.

* This Spring, the first Modern Warfare 2 content packs will be available exclusively first on Xbox LIVE.

For more information on NATAL, here is the full keynote of Microsoft discussing the upcoming accessory and how it will conuquer the Z-Axis.