Xbox sets up Xbox Labs, a small team to turn emerging tech ideas into things players can try

Xbox has formed a new group called Xbox Labs to experiment with emerging technology and put the results in front of players. The plan was laid out in a memo to Xbox employees around the world that Xbox Wire published on October 13. The memo is signed Asha, and Asha Sharma is listed on Xbox’s leadership page as CEO of Xbox.

What Xbox Labs is for

Sharma describes Labs as a small team that mixes developers, engineers and scientists, with the task of taking early ideas and shaping them into something players and developers can actually use. She says she has asked a colleague named in the post only as Scott to set the group up. “We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating,” Sharma wrote. She adds that Xbox will pass the tools it builds on to developers across the industry as it goes.

Why now

The memo points to what Sharma has seen in recent weeks: titles pulled apart and reassembled for machines their makers never targeted, Windows PC versions converted to run on Apple Silicon or inside a web browser using WebAssembly and WebGPU, and big games remixed into the code of other games. She notes that WebGPU now works in close to 90% of browsers worldwide.

Sharma argues these experiments question old assumptions, such as the link between a game and the hardware it ships on and the line between making games and playing them. Easier access, new life for old games and more players creating content are good for players, she writes, even when they put pressure on Xbox’s current business models.

She also connects the move to AI agents. Sharma says software development was the first major task handed to agents, since they can produce code and then execute and check it themselves, and she argues games have similar traits. She adds that people play more than 72 billion hours of Xbox games a year, which she puts at about five times the estimated hours spent writing code around the world.

What isn’t changing

According to the memo, Xbox’s priorities stay the same. Sharma lists the company’s 4Cs, making great games, its hardware and looking after its IP and player communities, and says Labs lets Xbox try new technology without dropping work that is already in progress.

What we don’t know yet

The memo does not name any Labs projects, products or release dates, give a team size, or say how players will be able to try the results.