•Xbox has established a new initiative called Xbox Labs, apparently in response to a recent wave of games being decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed for. The announcement came unusually quickly from the company.
The move was announced by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma in an internal message published on Xbox Wire. The initiative will be led by Xbox chief technical officer Scott Van Vliet, who previously led Azure for OpenAI at Microsoft.
“In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support,” wrote Sharma. “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 CEO
The announcement did not clearly define what Xbox Labs will do, with Sharma appearing to avoid mentioning AI or generative AI directly. She described recent “experiments” as challenging industry assumptions about “the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games.”
“For now, Labs represents a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists who will turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience,” Sharma said. “We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.”
Sharma suggested Xbox has a role to play because games share properties with software that AI agents can write, run, and test. She noted that people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.
The Labs announcement follows other recent Xbox developments. The company recently announced XP, a new division responsible for non-gaming partnerships like movie licensing and merchandising, which comprises four areas: Xbox Places, Xbox Pictures, Xbox Partnerships and Xbox Products.
The news also comes days after Google and Unity both announced gen-AI game-making platforms where users can supposedly create games using simple text prompts. Given the vagueness of the Labs announcement, it remains unclear whether Microsoft intends to pursue a similar approach.
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