Xbox Announces Xbox Labs to Bring Games to Browsers

Xbox announced the creation of Xbox Labs, a new group dedicated to exploring emerging technologies in the gaming universe. The information was released by Asha Sharma, CEO of the division, in a message sent to employees this Tuesday (13).

The Labs will be led by Scott Van Vliet, CTO of Xbox, and will bring together a small team of developers, engineers, and scientists with the mission of transforming emerging ideas into experiences that players and developers can access. The proposal is to build openly, learn from audience behavior, and measure success by the number of people playing and creating.

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In the message, Sharma explicitly cited the recent experiments that motivated the creation of the group. She mentioned games being "quickly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed for," as well as PC builds translated to Apple Silicon and ports running in browsers via WebAssembly and WebGPU, which already has around 90% global support in browsers.

In recent months, projects such as the decompilation of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 using 17 AI agents in parallel and over 500 billion tokens, and the recreation of Fallout have emerged. Designed to run in a web browser, they caught the industry's attention. Tools like Claude and Codex have been used to speed up the process.

For Sharma, these cases demonstrate the potential to make great games more accessible, breathe new life into old titles, and allow more players to become creators. "I want our game creators to help shape what these new technologies make possible," he stated.

The executive highlighted that games share properties with traditional programming and that people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox titles, about five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.

Sharma also made it clear that the company's priorities remain unchanged. Xbox maintains its commitment to the so-called 4Cs: producing great games, hardware, and responsible management of intellectual property and communities. According to her, Labs is a way to explore new technologies without abandoning ongoing work. The tools developed by the group will be shared with developers across the industry.