Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs on 13 October 2026: a small team of game makers, engineers and scientists meant to “turn emerging ideas” into things players and developers can try. Her memo to Team Xbox staff worldwide was published the same day on Xbox Wire. In it, Sharma says she has asked “Scott” to stand up the group; GamesBeat identifies him as Scott Van Vliet, Xbox’s chief technology officer.
Decompiled games and AI agents behind the idea
The memo is unusually specific about the outside work that inspired the move. Sharma writes that in recent weeks “we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support”. She also points to Windows PC builds translated to run on Apple Silicon, and to games ported to the browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, noting that WebGPU is now approaching 90% global browser support.
She ties the effort to AI agents as well. “Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software,” the memo says, adding that games share those traits. It names three goals:
- making great games easier to access;
- giving older games new life;
- “allowing more players to become creators and co-creators”.
No projects, team size or dates yet
Sharma says the team will “build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating”. She also says Xbox’s existing priorities are not changing and that Xbox will remain a responsible steward of its IP and the communities around it. According to GamesBeat, Sharma says tools the team builds will be shared with developers across the industry.
For now there is nothing to play. The Xbox Labs website offers an animated page and an email sign-up for updates, but lists no projects. The memo names no first experiment, release date, team size or specific games, and does not say whether the decompilation and porting work it cites will lead to official re-releases of Xbox back-catalogue titles.
Community decompilation projects and unofficial ports have long sat in a legal grey zone for platform holders. Here a platform holder publicly describes that kind of work as something to learn from rather than only something to police, and places it next to Microsoft’s interest in AI agents. Whether Xbox Labs ships experiments players can use, and on what terms for rights holders, is still open.