Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs on October 13, 2026, a small team led by chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet to experiment with emerging game technologies as AI-powered ports and remixes challenge assumptions about development.
Ports and remixes prompted the new team
In a staff note, Sharma described recent examples including Mario-style platforming inside Elden Ring and Call of Duty running in a web browser. Video Games Chronicle reported that these experiments used Claude’s Opus 5.5 generative AI model, with modders decompiling and rebuilding games to run on hardware they were not designed to support.
Other examples include Windows PC games translated for Apple Silicon and browser ports using WebAssembly and WebGPU. The report puts WebGPU support at close to 90% of browsers worldwide. These are examples of what creators have recently achieved, not a list of confirmed Xbox Labs projects.
Sharma said the group will bring emerging ideas to players and developers, build in the open and learn from how people use what it makes. Xbox will judge the work by whether it helps more people play and create. That direction speaks to a modding scene already finding new ways to reshape existing games, from fresh Oblivion Remastered mods to experiments that stretch what a familiar game can become.
Xbox frames access and creation as potential benefits
The potential, Sharma said, is to make games easier to access, give older titles new life and let more people become creators or co-creators. She connected that aim to the way games can be written, run and tested, much like coding tasks that have become an early focus for AI agents.
Xbox says people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing its games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. That scale helps explain why the company sees games as a significant area for experimentation, while fan projects also raise questions about platform rules and intellectual property, as seen in AI-generated Fallout fan-game efforts.
No Labs product or release plan announced
Xbox has not announced a specific Labs product, supported game list, release date, price or public access program. Sharma said the company’s priorities remain its 4Cs, making great games, its hardware, and responsible stewardship of its intellectual property and communities.
The team’s work is exploratory for now. Sharma said Xbox intends to share the tools it develops with developers across the industry as it learns, but gave no timetable for when any Labs experiments might become available.
