Xbox Announces Xbox Labs, Aimed in Part at Getting Improved Old-Gen Games Playable in Web Browsers

Xbox has announced Xbox Labs, a new initiative aimed at getting games to more people in more places — with a particular emphasis on web browsers.

No doubt seeing the growing community of games getting improved versions ported into web browsers (like the 94fps browser version of Halo: Combat Evolved), Microsoft itself is keen to get in on the action in support of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s goal of reaching 1 billion players per day.

Xbox has been tinkering with running Xbox and Xbox 360 games in browsers, and the Xbox Labs initiative is a formalization of those efforts that will see a small team of engineers playing with emerging technologies in order to find new ways for games new and old to be distributed and even created. And IGN understands that this won’t just be an R&D effort; rather, Xbox Labs is tasked with shipping products – Sharma says, “We’ll build in the open” – and getting gamers to engage with them.

I’d suggest thinking about it as a next phase of the backward compatibility efforts that started at Xbox over a decade ago, which the recent disc-to-digital program built on (which, side note, is a much more consumer-friendly path towards the seemingly inevitable digital future than what Sony is doing), and now Xbox Labs aims to take it even further. It remains to be seen if or how Xbox will look to monetize its Xbox Labs offerings, be it via an upfront cost, in-game microtransactions, or in-game-ad-based revenue.

The Xbox Labs announcement continues a busy stretch for Xbox, which revealed its entertainment-industry-focused Xbox XP arm last week.

Here’s Sharma’s memo to the team (also posted to Xbox Wire) in full:

Team,

The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we’ve helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.

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.

These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. 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. 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.

I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We’ve spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.

Our priorities aren’t changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.

Asha