Xbox has announced a brand-new initiative that aims to make older console games more accessible to modern players by making them playable in web browsers. The initiative, dubbed Xbox Labs, was announced by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma through a message that was also shared with everyone working under the Xbox banner. Xbox Labs will be headed up by Xbox CTO Scott van Vliet.
Sharma cites the recent advances that the gaming industry has seen in efforts to decompile and recompile older titles, allowing hobbyist developers to create PC ports for games that were previously console-exclusive.
“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.”
Noting that these efforts have raised questions about the relationship between software and hardware, Sharma has said that the company wants to further invest in these efforts with its own engineers, while also maintaining a level of transparency with the community at large. She also believes that Xbox can play a major role in this department owing to the company’s history of developing games and creating development pipelines that have also integrated modern tech like AI agents.
“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.”
Sharma capped off the announcement by noting that the company’s “priorities aren’t changing.” Rather, through Labs, Xbox will be able to further explore new technology in parallel with other development efforts that are continuing throughout the company.
It will likely be quite a bit of time before we see Xbox Labs’ efforts start paying off, however. Xbox has most probably only recently begun staffing up the Labs team, and its choice of first project will also likely take some time to finalize. It is worth noting that Xbox Labs is expected to start working on its own older projects rather than those developed by third-party studios, owing to the easier access to source code.
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