Xbox Announce Xbox Labs, Initiative to Explore Emerging Ideas and New Technology - News
by William D'Angelo , posted 3 days ago / 1,201 Views
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma in an email sent to Xbox employees announced Xbox Labs, a new initiative that comprises a small team of game makers, engineers, and scientists to test out emerging ideas and new technology.
Xbox Labs was formed following the rapid decompiling and rebuilding of games in recent weeks to run on hardware the were never originally designed to support.
Xbox's priorities aren't changing as they remaining committed to the 4Cs, developing games, hardware, and being stewards to IP and communities built around it.
Vitis the Xbox Labs website here.
Read the email from Asha Sharma below:
Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we’ve helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
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.
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, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. 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. 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.
Our priorities aren’t changing. 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. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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"We have noticed that there are a lot of people out there that know about this stuff more than the imbeciles we have working here". Maybe if they hadn't spent the last few years hiring people based on everything instead of talent, they wouldn't be on this situation.
You wanna see even worse incompetence? Look at the CEO of Microsoft.
What does this actually mean. It says so much and so little at the same time. Its God tier marketing speak. Politicians can only dream.
It sounds like an AI thing without saying AI
Oh man, how have I never clocked that? Of course these statements are AI generated.
Along with the aforementioned emerging trend of decompilations, I feel like this is also a response to the PS5 being jailbroken to high holy hell lol
...and in a follow up email, Asha Sharma announced a restructuring at Xbox Labs and multiple redundancies.
