Xbox Creates New Labs Division to Test Emerging Technology

Xbox has formed a new team called Xbox Labs to explore what emerging technologies can make possible for players and developers.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced the group in a memo to employees. The memo, also published on Xbox Wire on October 13, describes 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." Sharma said the team will build in the open and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.

Scott Van Vliet will lead the new group. Van Vliet has been Xbox CTO since May and previously served as CVP for Azure OpenAI and AI Infrastructure at Microsoft, according to Insider Gaming.

Sharma pointed to recent game ports and remixes. She cited games being decompiled and rebuilt for hardware they were never designed for, Windows PC builds translated to Apple Silicon or ported to browsers through WebAssembly and WebGPU, and big games remixed into another game's source code. These experiments "challenge long-held assumptions about our industry," she wrote.

Sharma said Xbox's priorities are not 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," she wrote, adding that Labs lets Xbox explore new technology "without abandoning the work already underway."

The memo does not use the term AI. It does compare games to coding, which Sharma called "the first major workload for agents." Insider Gaming wrote that the announcement reads like another industry push into AI.

Players can sign up for updates. An Xbox Labs site currently offers an email sign-up, according to Pure Xbox. No timeline for specific projects has been announced.