January 5^th, 2006 (11:05am) - At the recent CES conference Bill Gates took the stand to deliver a stirring keynote address where a great many things were revealed. Soon after, Peter Moore hopped on stage and took over to speak about the future of Microsoft’s latest gaming system, the Xbox 360.

After patting themselves on the back for a bit talking about the unprecedented global launch and how the idea of Xbox is now five years old debuting the news at that very conference, Moore went on to the meat of his presentation and revealed the following:

-Microsoft wants to sell between 4.5 and 5.5 million Xbox 360s by June 2006. Xbox 360 as it stands has an attach rate of 4 games and 3 accessories per console.

-A third factory (Celestica) will be added in February for producing the Xbox 360, next to the Wistron and Flextronics factories.

-Speaking about the new Xbox Live service we are informed that 10% were subscribers for the original Xbox and now 50% are subscribers for the 360 Live service.

-There have been 4 million Marketplace Downloads since launch. The most popular downloads seem to be movie trailers such as MI:3.

-By March they expect to be touting 20 games on Xbox Live Arcade

-In huge news Moore announced that an external HD-DVD drive will be released from Microsoft to connect to the Xbox 360. Although they have told us a release date of 2006, no details were given on price or any pictures for that matter. They did mention that the drive was to be used for movies, no gaming was in fact mentioned.

-9 out of 10 Xbox 360 owners have purchased or plan to purchase an HDTV. 90% say the primary reason to want an HDTV is the Xbox 360 console.

-Along those lines Microsoft expects to release more than 50 High Definition Xbox 360 games by June.

-Finally Al Bernstein (ESPN boxing analyst) steps up to showcase EA’s ’Night Fight Round 3’. Bill Gates was Muhammad Ali playing against Steve Ballmer (Microsoft’s CEO) as Frazier. After a brief battle Gates came out victorious. A demo of this game is now available from the Marketplace. With that, they concluded the Xbox portion of the address.