By Paula Beaton CEO Asha Sharma revealed Xbox Labs to staff this morning in an announcement published on Xbox Wire, but it’s unclear what the new division will actually be delivering.
This new initiative will be spearheaded by Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, alongside a small group of game makers, engineers, and scientists who will “turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience,” according to Sharma.
Despite being careful to avoid mention of generative AI, Sharma’s announcement has left players wondering if that’s exactly what this new division could involve.
“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 billions 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.”
Asha Sharma’s message spoke about the rapid decompilation of games and games being remixed from one title into another. She also mentioned that Xbox Labs will “challenge long-held assumptions about our industry” while “making great games easier to access” and “giving old games new life.”
What all this means is unclear, but the link to the Xbox Labs site could provide some insight. There’s not a lot to see there yet except a tagline, which reads, “Let’s play with what’s next.” A reference to generative AI game-making platforms, perhaps?
Here’s a bit more from Sharma’s announcement:
“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.”
Of course, that’s just speculation at this point, but it’s interesting to note that this news lands just a few days after gen-AI game making platforms were announced by both Unity and Google. These platforms would supposedly allow users to use text prompts for game creation.
Could that be what Xbox Labs will bring to the table? The Xbox CEO finished her announcement with the below:
“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.”
This Xbox Labs news follows a busy couple of weeks of Xbox updates, including the latest from its town hall meeting and confirmation from Sharma that the brand is not for sale.