Shortly after her coronation in February, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said the company was ditching "features that don’t align with where we’re headed." That included ending the development of Microsoft's genAI-powered assistant, Copilot, for consoles.
Now, Sharma has formed a new division called Xbox Labs inspired by "experiments" that have resulted in video games being decompiled, rebuilt, and remixed. You know, the ones churned out by generative AI models like Claude (thanks, Kotaku).
In a message to Xbox employees (shared on Xbox Wire), Sharma indicated Xbox Labs will follow that lead in order to "challenge long-held assumptions about our industry."
"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," she wrote.
"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."
Xbox Labs will be helmed by Xbox CTO Scott Van Vilet, who previously led the Azure Open AI team at Microsoft.
It's important to note the words "artificial intelligence" (generative or otherwise) are not used once in Sharma's memo, but she does emphasise the division will strive to turn turn "emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience."
Sharma claims Xbox Labs will "build in the open" and measure success based on whether "more people are playing and creating." That commitment to transparency presumably means we won't have to wait long to understand what the division has actually set out to build.
"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," Sharma continues. "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,"
In the meantime, Xbox workers must strive to turn around the company's fortunes under Sharma after being subjected years of mass layoffs.
Chris is an award-winning reporter with over a decade of experience covering the video game industry. He was formerly news editor at Game Developer and is currently the founder and editor of this resplendent website.
