This message was just sent to Team XBOX employees globally.
Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we’ve helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments 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. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, 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. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly 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 makers 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 as we always have.
Our priorities aren’t 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. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha
So, Xbox Labs is going to be their let’s make games with AI push?
I have read this multiple times and still no idea what it’s supposed to be about as the expected end-product. Porting old games to modern systems? Making games more moddable? Playing on browser?
AI is great when it has a well-functioning existing code based. I left the industry over 20 years ago but still have contacts. From what I’m hearing AI has been great at porting code. I see two possible direction xbox is going. They can port older games like Blue Dragon to webassembly using AI. They will need a webassembly version of a 360 vm but I’m assuming they would use AI for that. Imagine playing xbox games native in a browser. Not cloud but binearies running in a browser. They other platfrom is ARM for both macos and windows. It’s a complete joke that most xbox games run under emulation for ARM. I’m assuming they can use AI to do native port for ARM. Those are the couple of low hanging fruits. AI is changing the world no matter if we like it or not. Better get educated about it and don’t listen to nuts on social media trying to tell you what it is or isn’t. The truth can be much stranger than fiction.
AI native ports to ARM would be perfect for native smartphone versions or even getting your games on the Mac App Store or on handhelds. The current decomp trend is insane, if harnessed by a big player, it would have a lot of potential!
I realize for code it’s likely to be a disadvantage to NOT use it.
But people are rightfully worried about its uses in generating assets, voice acting, music.
I certainly hope not. It sounds more like they are bringing these different groups to experiment on new ideas which could be good. After all experimentation like this could lead to things like Quick Resume and if it is to be believed maybe even new engines or ways of fixing and upgrading engines. From the positive point if it isn’t some cock and bull s**t PR or AI nonsense it could yield amazing results which I hope it does. Xbox has always been a pioneer in gaming technology.
It seems to me Asha is pretty much trying to use Xbox to build an entertainment division within Microsoft much like the OG Xbox and 360 were under the entertainment division and eventually took over it before it was abolished after the 2013 hiccup.
What about the cost. It’s still being speculated that the real costs are being highly subsidized and is untenable.
It’s not speculation, AI is expensive as heck, ad revenue can’t keep up, companies have started to pull back from it after they stop subsidizing. Microsoft being one example as they cut their spending on Claude code by one third.
The problem is the emerging ideas around AI have all been about, doing things like emulation which; Microsoft can’t do more than what they have without getting sued.
ML upscaling, which AMD and Nvidia have cornered so Microsoft did not go too deep on their own solution(Super Resolution), with Loss less Scaling being the third party option that can be used across every device (even mobile thanks to a new Steam 3rd party launcher on android). Speaking of, one thing Microsoft could copy is getting the mobile Xbox store running. But without tweaking games like on PC that could be an issue as Series S settings alone wouldn’t be good enough to get a good experience and I doubt most companies would allow Microsoft to just tweak their code.
Browser games, which have existed for a really long time and still require an internet connection (if no download is required) and good enough hardware render the game in the browser. They also have xcloud running on a browser, so going this route would be counter intuitive.
Ripping out assets from one game to put in another, which Microsoft can only do with their own properties without getting sued.
Fixing shader stutter, which Microsoft said they are working on for their own store. But already have competion amd are trailing one third party tool and AMD who are already using their own really good solutions.
To me it feels like the bigger things that could be done with AI have their PC counter parts already. So Microsoft needs to focus on bridging the gap in tech between their console and PC, with their own solutions that never really got off the ground. Including that mobile store.
CoPilot translate this word salad into a simple and short paragraph.
Any new technology we are should be worried about it. The problem is there are a lot of people on social media using the valid worry to create wrong information to generate traffic for themselves. Everyone needs to educate themselves about the topic and not just depend on what other people are saying.
Hope it’s not AI.
Hope so too but so many are saying it is.
It’s definitely experimenting with it yes, as all that decompiling stuff they’re going on about was all done using AI tools.
I imagine it’s partially to help keep AI out of the rest of Xbox to a degree but show Microsoft they are committed to their latest fad, and if it’s able to automate some areas that aren’t profitable (so new mean Microsoft isn’t ever going to pay for a big team of devs to do it anyway) but fans enjoy like improving backwards compatibility it may not be so bad I guess