Xbox Labs, a new team within Microsoft’s gaming group, will explore ways to turn emerging technology into experiences for players and developers. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced the team on Tuesday. Led by Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet, it’s “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience,” Sharma said.
The announcement names no specific product or release date. Instead, it points to experiments already changing how games can be modified, ported and played. Sharma cited projects that have rebuilt games for hardware they weren’t designed for, ported Windows PC builds to Apple Silicon, and brought games to browsers using WebAssembly and WebGPU. She said WebGPU was approaching 90% global browser support.
Other experiments have combined characters and worlds from different games, such as Call of Duty zombies in Skyrim and Miles Morales in Arkham City. Sharma also pointed to the original Halo: Combat Evolved running in a browser with 128-player multiplayer, and FromSoftware’s Bloodborne running on PC. These projects are experimental and unauthorized, but Sharma said they “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.”
Sharma sees potential in making games easier to access, giving older titles new life, and letting more people become creators or co-creators. She called these “unmistakably good outcomes for players,” even when they challenge existing business models. Xbox Labs, she said, will “build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.”
What the team will actually do remains unclear. Its website is an ASCII-style page with trailers for Halo: Infinite, Fable, Sea of Thieves and Gears of War: E-Day playing in the background, but it doesn’t explain what Labs will build. The announcement gives no product details or release date.
The new direction also comes alongside Sharma’s earlier warning against flooding Xbox with “soulless AI slop.” When she became CEO in February, she said the company would “not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us.”
In Tuesday’s announcement, Sharma said Xbox’s priorities remain the 4Cs – Core, Content, Creator and Connection – along with making games, building hardware, and responsibly stewarding its intellectual property and the communities around it. “Labs gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway,” she said.
Xbox made its announcement a day after Epic Games confirmed it was “embracing AI-accelerated development.” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called the effort a “huge pivot” for the Fortnite and Unreal Engine maker. Reported changes include ending handwritten game code and creating all future artwork through “full AI workflows.”
