Xbox Reveals Xbox Labs, Apparently an AI-Focused Game Development Division, Without Mentioning AI

Xbox Responds to the Flood of New Game Ports, Decompiles, and Compilations Seen Online in Recent Weeks by Launching Xbox Labs, a New Initiative Apparently Designed to Explore the Phenomenon — Quickly, though to an unclear degree. Continue reading

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"I think Xbox has a big role to play here."

Xbox is responding to the flood of new game ports, decompiles, and compilations we've seen online in recent weeks — uncharacteristically quickly — by creating Xbox Labs, a new initiative apparently designed to explore this phenomenon.

Xbox Labs was announced by CEO Asha Sharma in a message to employees posted on Xbox Wire. The initiative is led by Xbox Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Scott Van Vliet, who previously led Azure for OpenAI at Microsoft.

So what is Xbox Labs? The announcement doesn't give a clear answer, and Sharma apparently refuses to mention artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence in the language.

"In recent weeks, we've seen games quickly decompile and refactor to run on hardware they weren't originally designed to support," Sharma writes. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the world's biggest games turn into another game's source code.

These "experiments" challenge long-standing industry assumptions such as "the link between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games," Sharma added. And Xbox Labs was formed to "explore" that and more.

Currently, the lab features "a small group of game developers, engineers and scientists" who "turn emerging ideas into things that our players and developers can experience," Sharma said.

Sharma added: "I think Xbox has a big role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run and test software. Games share many of the same features, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, which is almost five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide."

Xbox recently introduced XP, a new division responsible for non-game partnerships such as film licensing and merchandising, which consists of four areas: Xbox Places, Xbox Pictures, Xbox Partnerships and Xbox Products.

The news also comes days after Google and Unity both announced Gen-AI game creation platforms, which will apparently allow users to create games using simple text messages. Given the vagueness of Labs' announcement, it's unclear whether Microsoft is interested in the same idea.