Xbox announces Xbox Labs to explore ’emerging technologies’

Xbox has announced Xbox Labs, a new initiative focused on exploring ’emerging technologies’ and their potential applications in video games.

According to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, the initiative will bring together a small group of game makers, engineers, and scientists to experiment with new ideas, including making games more accessible, giving older games new life, and enabling more players to become creators.

Xbox Labs will be led by Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet.

Xbox said the group will share the tools it develops with developers across the industry, while emphasizing that its existing priorities remain unchanged, including its commitment to the four Cs, games, hardware, and responsible stewardship of its intellectual property and communities.

Read the full announcement from Sharma below.

Team,

The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make Xbox what it is today, and we’ve helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. 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.

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. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, 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. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. 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. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. 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. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.

Our priorities aren’t changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. Labs gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.

—Asha