Microsoft has formed Xbox Labs, a small team that will explore new ways to make, port, and play games after a wave of AI-assisted mods and recompilations. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced the group on 13 October and asked chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet to lead it.
According to VGC’s report on the staff memo, the team will bring together game makers, engineers, and scientists to turn emerging ideas into experiences for players and developers. Sharma’s priorities include making games easier to access, giving older titles new life, and letting more players become creators.
In her announcement on X, reproduced by Windows Central, Sharma said Labs would build in the open and share tools with developers across the industry.
Ports and remixes set the agenda
Sharma pointed to experiments that rebuild games for hardware their developers never originally supported. Her examples included Windows PC games translated to run on Apple Silicon, games ported into browsers using WebAssembly and WebGPU, and major titles remixed into another game’s source code.
VGC describes the wider trend through mashups such as Mario platforming in Elden Ring and Call of Duty running in a browser. These are examples of the modding activity that prompted the initiative; Sharma’s memo sets out a broader remit for the team.
Her argument centres on the relationship between a game, the hardware that runs it, and the people who change it. She sees the recent experiments as a challenge to established boundaries between creation and play, as well as to the ways players discover and experience games.
Sharma called wider access and more opportunities to create “unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.” That gives Labs a mandate to examine ideas whose appeal to players could push against the way Xbox currently operates.
The trend also extends beyond conventional console releases. Tbreak recently covered Tweetcraft, an AI-built Minecraft-style game playable from a post on X, another example of experiments with where people encounter and play games.
A game-design-led approach to agents
GeekWire reports that Sharma’s memo never explicitly uses the term AI, although it connects the initiative to software agents. Her reasoning is that coding became an early workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software, and games share many of those properties.
In the memo, Sharma puts annual time spent playing Xbox games at more than 72 billion hours, roughly five times her estimate of the time spent writing code worldwide. She uses that comparison to explain why gaming offers a large field for experimentation, with Xbox’s game makers helping shape the technology.
GeekWire also places the move alongside Sharma’s earlier decisions on AI products. In May, she pulled Gaming Copilot from mobile and cancelled its console launch. Her latest memo describes Labs as game-design-led and measures its success by whether more people play and create.
Alongside Xbox’s broader changes
Labs follows the creation of Xbox XP, a separate division for extending franchises into film, television, merchandise, partnerships, and physical experiences.
In Xbox’s official 8 October leadership announcement, Sharma framed XP around the Creator and Connection parts of the company’s four-Cs strategy. Labs addresses a different set of opportunities: the technology behind games and the ways people can adapt or access them.
Sharma says the new group sits alongside Xbox’s existing commitments to making games, developing hardware, and looking after intellectual property and its communities. Its remit is to explore emerging technology while that work continues.
Who will lead Xbox Labs?
Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet will lead the group, which will include game makers, engineers, and scientists.
Can players sign up to try Xbox Labs projects?
The announcement provides no sign-up process or public testing date. Sharma says the team plans to build in the open and learn from how people use its work.
