Microsoft has created a new team called Xbox Labs to experiment with technologies that are changing how games are made, ported and played. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced the group on October 13, 2026, in a memo to employees that Microsoft also published on Xbox Wire.
What Xbox Labs is
Sharma described Xbox Labs 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." According to GeekWire, the group is led by Scott Van Vliet, who has been Xbox's chief technology officer since May.
"We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating," Sharma wrote.
Why now: decompiled games and new ports
Sharma pointed to a wave of recent community projects. In the memo, she wrote that "in recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support." She said Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, which she said is approaching 90% global browser support. She also noted that "many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another."
The Verge reported that many of these mods use AI models to help modders remix games. Windows Central reported that the team will also work on compatibility layers, such as bringing Xbox games to Apple silicon and the web.
The pitch: games as the next workload for agents
Sharma compared games to software development: "Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties." She said people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, which she described as roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.
She added that Microsoft will "share the tools we build with developers across the industry."
What isn't changing
According to the memo, Xbox's priorities stay the same. "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," Sharma wrote. She described Labs as "a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway."
Sharma acknowledged that some of these experiments "challenge our existing business models," but said that making games easier to access, giving old games new life and turning more players into creators are good outcomes for players.
Context
Polygon noted the announcement differs in tone from Sharma's statement in February, when she took over as Xbox CEO and said the company would "not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop."
