Xbox has launched Xbox Labs.
In a message to employees globally, CEO Asha Sharma said the initiative will bring together game makers, engineers and scientists to turn new ideas into experiences for players and developers. The new initiative explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies could change how people create, access, and play games. The announcement comes as experiments in AI, software portability, and game modification challenge traditional boundaries between gaming hardware, software development, and content creation.
Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We’ve spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible.
These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. Because they can write, run, and test software, coding became the first major workload for agents.
Sharma said Xbox Labs will focus on building new tools, testing emerging possibilities, and learning from how people use them, aiming to make games more accessible and let more players become creators. She also said the initiative would not change Xbox’s existing priorities, including developing games, supporting hardware and protecting intellectual property and gaming communities. Sharma’s message outlines how Microsoft’s gaming division plans to explore these technologies while continuing its existing work. In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators While it is hard to predict the future of gaming. To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. I think XBOX has an important role to play here. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.