XBOX has started a new division with very vague purposes.
Asha Sharma has announced 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.
In explaining why she was launching this division, Asha said this:
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.
It’s interesting that other companies would have threatened legal action vs. these recompilation projects, and Asha wants XBOX to try these themselves.
Some observers speculated that Asha avoided saying AI, but XBOX already has an existing AI project, and Asha cancelled an XBOX AI project. If we were to speculate, Asha correctly observed not all of these projects ran on AI, and she’s reacting to the fans making their own projects.
