•Microsoft games chief Asha Sharma has announced Xbox Labs, a new research and development group tasked with exploring emerging technologies in gaming. The initiative arrives as fan-made projects have increasingly recompiled classic titles to run on hardware they were never designed for.
The announcement comes amid Microsoft’s ongoing restructuring of its game division. Sharma clarified that AI usage will not be mandatory under Xbox Labs, distinguishing it from reportedly becoming standard practice at Epic Game development.
“In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support,” Sharma wrote in her introductory statement. “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.
“Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.”
Asha Sharma, Xbox games chief
Rather than pursuing legal action against DIY decompilers republishing titles such as Halo or adding features to Call of Duty, Sharma said Xbox wants to engage with these developments itself.
“To explore these possibilities,” the statement continues, “I’ve asked Scott [Van Vliet, Xbox’s chief technology officer] 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.”
Asha Sharma, Xbox games chief
The group follows a period of significant layoffs at Microsoft’s game division. Recent restructuring has seen Obsidian put to work on a new Fallout while Playground Game and Turn 10 have been merged, consolidating focus on Forza Horizon at the cost of the Forza Motorsport sim racing series.
Decompilation projects have existed within gaming for years, often used for creating unofficial PC ports. The introduction of AI into this space is a more recent development, with proponents arguing it drastically reduces the time required to convert game source code into human-readable, editable form.
However, not all developers are convinced. Banjo Kazooie: Recompiled developer DarioSamo has argued that teams can already get a recompilation running in less than a day using non-AI tools, warning that a largely automated approach risks ignoring the additional work involved with ensuring a recompiled game runs stably.
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