A story on Gamesindustry.biz states that Bill Gates will be the keynote speaker at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. He is expected to make the formal announcement of Xbox 2 at that time. Lately, news coming out of the Xbox camp has been pretty good. Peter Molyneux’s action RPG Fable was released for the platform and went on to become the fastest selling game in Xbox history. Though this record is not likely to stand as Halo 2 has surpassed 1.5 million preorders for its November 9 release date.
And to that good news, I would add that the likelihood of backwards compatibility on Xbox 2 has increased with the recent release of Microsoft Virtual PC for MacOS X. Why? Because today’s Macintosh computers are built around the a PowerPC (PPC) architecture similar to that is rumored to be at the core of Xbox 2. Well this is more than rumor since early development kits are also based on PPC. So it is more plausible that backwards compatibility can be achieved using Virtual PC-like emulation. This could also get them around the challenge presented by going from Nvidia to ATI for the graphics chip set. Backwards compatibility would go a long way towards supporting the launch of Xbox 2.
So far from being dead, Xbox 2 is alive and kicking. This probably due in no small part to Bill Gates’ personal involvement or at least interest in the project. Gates didn’t make his money being stupid. Perhaps he realizes that if Microsoft is going to thrive in a post-PC, post-Windows era, it needs to get into other markets. Games are a natural progression and a huge growth market rivalling movies and television. If MS can get a piece of that pie, it won’t hurt so much when Windows and Office shipments start to drop off.