Speaking during the Microsoft Keynote speech by Bill Gates at CES 2006 in Las Vegas, Peter Moore has confirmed that Microsoft will soon have access to XBox 360 consoles from a new factory. This, according to Mr. Moore, will allow Microsoft to reach its target of selling 4.5 to 5.5 million units worldwide by June 30, 2006.
According to Moore sales of the XBox 360 are still going strong and he seemed particularly happy concerning the ...attach rate of four games per console, and an accessory level and attach rate of three per console... which are almost double those of the original XBox.
The most significant point made by Moore had to do with the availability of the new console and to this end he stated ...next month Selectica will join both Flextronics and Wistron as our third manufacturing partner. We need to meet the consumer demand worldwide and having this ability now to do that with three manufacturing partners helps us do that.
Peter Moore also seemed excited about the potential of XBox Live claiming that ...on Xbox 10 percent of customers connected their box to the Internet, on Xbox 360 more than 50 percent of all consoles worldwide are now connected to Xbox Live. Mr. Moore, of course, failed to mention that XBox 360 has just been released and that the figures are unlikely to stay this high and also that XBox Live now also offers a free Silver mode which allows users to connect to the XBox Live marketplace. Moore went on to claim that, in the four weeks since the X360 launch, 4 million Xbox Live marketplace downloads have taken place.
On the hardware side there was an announcement that MS will be releasing an HD DVD drive later this year for the console while attendants also received a guarantee that Xbox 360 will have 50 high definition games by June of this year.
Peter Moore's segment of the keynote address ended with a rather odd duel between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on Fight Night Round 3 as Ali and Frasier respectively. The posturing and trash talk was odd and rather off-putting but the idea was to demonstrate the EA game which saw its demo released through XBox Live today. Weighing in at a hefty 486MB the demo allows XBox 360 owners to play as Bernard Hopkins or Roy Jones Jr. XBox Live has already made demos of Quake 4 and Condemned available to gamers in the days following the console's launch.
