Xbox Forms Labs Group to Explore AI-Assisted Game Porting and Mods

Sharma described Xbox Labs as "a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience." She said the group will "build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating." The company said it will share tools and findings from the work with developers.

In the memo, Sharma pointed to experiments from recent weeks in which Windows PC builds were translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90 percent global browser support. She also cited cases where, in her words, many of the biggest games in the world "have been remixed into the source code of another."

Those experiments, Sharma wrote, "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." She added that while the future of gaming is hard to predict, "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." She called those outcomes "unmistakably good" for players, "even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models."

The modding work overlaps with what Microsoft has done for decades through its Xbox backward compatibility program, which lets older titles run on newer hardware. Independent modders are pursuing similar results without the business model constraints Microsoft operates under.

Sharma argued Xbox has a specific stake in AI agents. "Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software," she wrote, adding that people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.

Her memo also placed the effort in a longer company history, noting that the first video games appeared about 75 years ago and that Xbox has introduced hard drives to consoles, online gaming through Xbox Live, Game Pass and cloud gaming.

The Verge reported that it asked Microsoft to comment on unauthorized use of intellectual property in decompiles and recompiles that make games freely available, but the company did not respond in time for publication. That question remains open: Microsoft has not said how it will respond if recent console titles begin appearing on hardware and platforms where publishers did not intend them to run.