XBOX LABS Is a New Team for Experimental Game Tech

Five days after creating the XP division, XBOX CEO Asha Sharma has sent employees another memo, this time introducing XBOX LABS. The memo describes it as a small group of game makers, engineers, and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things players and developers can try. Sharma asked chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet to stand up the group, which will build in the open and measure its success by whether more people are playing and creating. As the team learns, Sharma says it will share the tools it builds with developers across the industry, and the group already has a home at labs.xbox.com.

What prompted LABS, according to the memo, is a run of experiments over the past few weeks in which games were rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported into a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter of which Sharma says is approaching 90 percent global browser support. Some of the biggest games in the world have also been remixed into the source code of another. Sharma writes that these experiments challenge the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover games. She calls them unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when they challenge XBOX’s existing business models.

The memo never uses the word AI, but it does say coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software, and Sharma argues games share many of those same properties. People spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, according to the memo, which is roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. When Sharma pulled the plug on Gaming Copilot in May, we noted it was a notable move from someone who came over from Microsoft’s CoreAI division. It also echoed her earlier promise not to flood the XBOX ecosystem with soulless AI slop.

Sharma says XBOX’s priorities aren’t changing, with the company still committed to the four Cs she outlined at last week’s town hall, to making great games, to its hardware, and to being a responsible steward of its IP and the communities around it. LABS, in her words, gives XBOX a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway. For now, the LABS site is mostly an email signup for updates, along with a clip of Gears of War: E-Day.