Xbox Unveils Xbox Labs, an Initiative Partly Aimed at Improving Older Games Playable in Web Browsers

Xbox Has Unveiled Xbox Labs, a New Initiative Aimed at Bringing Games to More People in More Places, With a Particular Emphasis on Web Browsers.

has announced Xbox Labs, a new initiative aimed at bringing games to more people in more places – with a particular emphasis on web browsers.

No doubt seeing a growing community of games porting enhanced versions to web browsers (such as the 94fps browser version of Halo: Combat Evolved), Microsoft itself is keen to step in to support new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's goal of reaching 1 billion daily players.

Xbox has been struggling with running Xbox and Xbox 360 games in browsers, and the Xbox Labs initiative is a formalization of those efforts, with a small team of engineers playing with emerging technologies to find new ways to distribute and even create new and old games. And IGN understands that this won't just be an R&D effort. Instead, Xbox Labs is tasked with shipping products — "we'll build in the open," says Sharma — and getting gamers to interact with them.

I'd suggest thinking of it as the next step in the backward compatibility efforts that began more than a decade ago on Xbox, the program on which Disc-to-Digital was recently built (which, as a side note, is a much more consumer-friendly path to a seemingly inevitable digital future than what Sony is), and now Xbox Labs plans to take it even further. It remains to be seen if Xbox looks to monetize its Xbox Labs products, whether through an upfront fee, in-game microtransactions, or in-game ad-based revenue.

The Xbox Labs announcement continues the busy Xbox division, which last week introduced its entertainment industry-focused Xbox XP arm.

Here's Sharma's note to the team (also posted on Xbox Wire) in full:

The first video games appeared about 75 years ago. There have been booms and busts since then, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them on, and best of all, more people playing than ever before. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've in turn helped shape the industry, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, along with franchises that have brought millions together.

In recent weeks, we've seen games quickly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they weren't originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run in-browser via WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% of global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the world's biggest games bundled into another game's source code.

These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the link between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it's hard to predict the future of gaming, it's easy to see the possibilities in making it easier to play great games, breathe new life into old games, and allow more players to get into games. These are undeniably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I've asked Scott to build XBOX LABS, a small group of game developers, engineers, and scientists tasked with turning emerging ideas into something our players and developers can experience. We build in the open, learn from what people are doing, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.

I think XBOX has a big role to play here. Coding became the first major job for agents because they could write, run, and test software. Games share many of the same characteristics, with people spending more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, nearly 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 developers 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 like always.

Our priorities don't change. We remain committed to the 4Cs, making great games, our hardware, and responsible stewards of the IP and communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work in progress.

Ryan McCaffrey is the executive editor of IGN Previews and the host of IGN's weekly Xbox podcast, the Unlocked Podcast, and co-host of the next console Watch. Uick is from North Jersey, so it's "Taylor's Ham," not "Pig Roulette." Discuss him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.