Asha Sharma, XBOX CEO, announced that the company is launching a new project, XBOX LABS, aimed at trying out new gaming features, reviving classic games, and porting them to new platforms.

In a message addressed to the team and shared publicly on X/Twitter and on the XBOX website, the CEO outlined one of the reasons for launching the project – porting games to new platforms, which has become widespread lately: "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."

XBOX LABS, according to Sharma, is designed to explore "the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators." The project will be a small team of game makers, engineers, and scientists led by XBOX CTO Scott Van Vliet, whose job will be to turn emerging ideas into experiences players and developers can engage with. "We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating," Sharma explains.

The CEO notes that XBOX, with its 25-year history, has an important role in a project of this type because games share the traits that made coding the first major workload for AI agents. What is more, people spend over 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, which is about five times the time people are estimated to spend writing code worldwide. Sharma concluded that, in the exploration of new technology, the company keeps its main course:

The "4Cs" are Xbox priorities for fiscal year 2027, previously shared by Asha Sharma:

Read the CEO's full announcement below:

CTO Scott Van Vliet also announced the project's launch and said that it wouldn't limit the scale of the gaming products involved, whether AA or indie, at least at the start.

Asha Sharma mentioned AI agents, but according to GamesIndustry.biz, a company spokesperson shared that XBOX LABS received no direct instruction to use AI or any other technology, and that the work would only involve it where useful or necessary. XBOX LABS is rather consolidating projects that were already underway instead of launching a new effort, and no new staff has been hired. The project's spheres of focus will be porting games to Apple Silicon, investigating browser-based distribution, specifically the WebGPU platform, and developing and supporting game modders. Some LABS projects may reach players as features in the Xbox Insiders program, while others could be aimed at different audiences and released through other channels.

Porting games to new platforms has indeed become more frequent. Some of the latest examples include making the 2001 Halo: Combat Evolved playable in a browser and bringing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind to the web.

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