Asha Sharma Announces XBOX LABS

In an internal message to employees, XBOX CEO Asha Sharma revealed that the organization will embrace AI for game creation via a new XBOX LABS team.

“In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support,” her email reads. “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 percent 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.”

It’s fair to say we live in interesting times. Just the past week, ArtCraft announced vibe-coded replacements for the top seven Adobe Creative Cloud apps, and it has Microsoft Office and other top-tier app replacements on the way. And Google announced a Playground vibe-coding tool for creating video games and opened up its Google AI Studio vibe-coding tool for Android and web apps to non-developers. Vibe coding is suddenly a way to make apps–including games–of all kinds. And the message here seems to be that XBOX needs to get in on that.

“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,” her email continues. “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.”

Sharma added that while this doesn’t change the organization’s priorities, XBOX LABS gives them a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work that’s already underway. She notes that people spend over 72 billion hours each year playing videogames, five times the time that people spend writing software code. And this combination of those activities could define gaming in the near- and long-term future.

You can learn more by signing up for a newsletter on the XBOX Labs website.