Xbox has a new experimental team. In a memo sent to employees and published on Xbox Wire on October 13, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs, which she described as “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience.”
The group will be led by Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet. Sharma said Labs will “build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.”
Why Xbox is doing this now
Sharma pointed to what players and modders have been doing lately. “In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support,” she wrote. She also noted Windows games being translated to run on Apple Silicon or in a web browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, and some of the biggest games in the world being “remixed into the source code of another.”
Those experiments, she said, “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.” She called easier access, new life for old games and more players becoming creators “unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.”
The memo never uses the word AI, but it comes close. Sharma noted that “coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software,” and argued games share many of those properties. People spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, she said, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. VGC reported the team is a response to the recent wave of AI-assisted mods and ports.
Priorities “aren’t changing”
Sharma stressed that Labs is an addition rather than a pivot. “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,” she wrote, adding that Xbox will share the tools it builds with developers across the industry.
The announcement lands a day after reports on Sharma’s latest town hall, where she told staff that Xbox won’t survive by reliving the past. Xbox has not said what Labs will ship first or when players will see its experiments.
