Xbox Labs: Asha Sharma forms a group to explore AI and ports

What we know

Sharma frames the announcement against recent experiments: games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt for hardware they were never designed for; Windows PC builds translated to Apple Silicon or ported to the browser via WebAssembly and WebGPU (the latter, she writes, now approaching 90% global browser support); and major games remixed into another game’s source code.

Video Games Chronicle frames the announcement as Microsoft’s response to the recent explosion of game mods, mashups and unlikely ports created with generative AI tools.

Those experiments, she says, challenge long-held assumptions about the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover games. The possibilities she highlights are making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and letting more players become creators or co-creators — good outcomes for players even when they challenge existing business models.

Who leads Labs

To explore that space, Sharma has asked Scott to stand up Xbox Labs. The Xbox Wire memo uses only the first name. Video Games Chronicle identifies Scott Van Vliet as Xbox’s CTO and the person leading the group; we attribute the surname to that secondary source.

The brief, per the memo: turn emerging ideas into things players and developers can experience; build in the open; learn from what people do; and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. Sharma adds that as they learn, they will share the tools with developers across the industry.

Sharma believes Xbox has an important role to play: “Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software,” and games share many of those same properties. According to the memo, people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.

Priorities unchanged

Sharma stresses that Xbox’s priorities are not changing: commitment to the 4Cs, to making great games, to hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities around it. Labs, she writes, is a way to explore new technology without abandoning work already underway.