Xbox has a new team dedicated to experimenting with the future of games. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs earlier this week (October 13th) in a memo sent to Xbox employees around the world, which was also published in full on Xbox Wire and shared on her X account. The group will be led by Scott Van Vliet, who joined Xbox as chief technology officer in May, and its job is to take emerging technology and turn it into things players and developers can actually try.
Sharma opened her post on X by saying, "Today we're standing up XBOX LABS," and linked to the new labs.xbox.com website, which currently shows a simple teaser with the line "Let's play with what's next." Check out her post below:
Why Xbox Is Doing This Now
The memo points directly at what the community has been doing with games over the past few weeks. Sharma wrote that games have been "rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support." She also called out Windows PC builds that have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a web browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, noting that WebGPU is now approaching 90% global browser support. On top of that, she said many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of other games.
Sharma sees all of this as an opportunity for Xbox. She wrote that these experiments challenge long-held assumptions about the tie between software and hardware, the line between creating and playing, and how people discover games. In her words, making great games easier to access, giving old games new life, and letting more players become creators are "unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models."
What Xbox Labs Will Actually Do
Xbox Labs is described in the memo as a small group of game makers, engineers, and scientists. Sharma said the team will "build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating." Xbox also plans to share the tools Labs builds with developers across the industry as it goes.
Van Vliet shared his own announcement on X shortly after, saying the best way to discover the future of gaming is to build it and that he plans to share the group's experiments soon. Check out his post below:
So far, neither the memo nor the Labs website names a specific game, product, or release window. Xbox also has not said whether anything that comes out of Labs will be free, sold, or tied to Game Pass.
The AI Agent Angle
Part of the memo leans on the rise of AI coding agents, even though it never uses the term AI directly. Sharma wrote that "Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software," and that games share many of those same properties. She added that people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, which she said is roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. Xbox has spent 25 years learning how to make games, and she wants its game makers to help shape what these new technologies can do.
Sharma was also clear that Labs is an addition to the company's existing plans. She wrote that Xbox remains committed to making great games, to its hardware, and to being responsible stewards of its IP and the communities built around it. The version of the memo she posted on X adds that Labs will explore new technology that is "game design led" without abandoning the work already underway.
A Busy Year Of Change At Xbox
Xbox Labs is the latest in a long run of big moves since Sharma became CEO in February. In a June memo on Xbox Wire, she said over 1 billion players choose to play Xbox and its games each year, totaling 72 billion hours across console, PC, mobile, and streaming, while also warning about a hardware component crisis that has pushed console storage costs to several times what they were two years ago. In July, she announced what she called the most significant restructure in Xbox history, with roughly 3,200 roles being cut through the fiscal year, Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions going independent, and Ninja Theory and Undead Labs moving to new ownership.
In that same July memo, Sharma set the goal of Xbox becoming one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people every day. Making games easier to reach on devices people already own, including the web browser on any phone or laptop, fits right into that plan. It also follows years of Xbox work on backward compatibility, which brought a large library of original Xbox and Xbox 360 games to newer consoles.
Would you rather see Xbox Labs bring classic Xbox and Xbox 360 games to your web browser, or focus on new tools that let players remix and create their own games?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.