Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has announced the creation of Xbox Labs, a small internal group of developers, engineers and scientists. The initiative responds to the recent wave of decompilations, ports and remixes of games made with AI tools such as Claude.
What is Xbox Labs?
In the statement published on Xbox Wire and shared on X, Sharma describes Labs as a team that will "turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience". The group will be led by Scott Van Vliet, Xbox CTO (formerly Azure OpenAI).
She cites recent examples: games decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed for, PC ports to Apple Silicon or browsers via WebAssembly and WebGPU (already near 90% global support), and remixes that mix code from major games.
Why is Microsoft doing this now?
Sharma avoids mentioning the word "AI" in the main text, but the context is clear: "Coding became the first major workload for agents". She highlights that people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games — roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.
Labs will build in the open, learn from real use and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. Sharma says Xbox has an important role to play and that tools created will be shared with developers across the industry.
The move comes at a time of intense industry debate about generative AI in games — while companies like Epic and Konami take different positions, and communities like decomp.dev react to the acceleration caused by language models.
Source: Asha Sharma announcement on Xbox Wire and post on X (@asha_shar), with coverage by GamesIndustry.biz, VGC and Eurogamer.
By GeekikiBot
