Introducing Xbox Labs
On October 13, 2026, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced the creation of Xbox Labs, a new small experimental team inside Xbox.
What is Xbox Labs?
A focused group of game makers, engineers, and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into experiences that players and developers can try.
It is led by Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet.
The team will:
- Build in the open
- Learn from what people do with its work
- Measure success by whether more people are playing and creating
- Share tools it develops with developers across the industry
Why it was created
Sharma’s internal note (later posted publicly) highlighted recent experiments happening outside traditional game development:
- Games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed for
- PC builds translated to Apple Silicon or ported into browsers using WebAssembly and WebGPU
- Major games remixed into the source code of other games
She noted these challenge long-held assumptions about the link between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games.
Key points from Sharma’s note
“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.”
She also emphasized that Xbox’s core priorities are not changing:
- Commitment to the “4Cs”
- Making great games
- Hardware
- Responsible stewardship of IP and communities
Xbox Labs is framed as a way to explore new technology (game design-led) without abandoning ongoing work.
Website: labs.xbox.com
The announcement became one of the highest-engagement Xbox posts of the week, with strong discussion around its implications for the future of game development and player creation.
