Xbox Launches Xbox Labs to Test Game Ideas and Tools

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced the creation of a new organization called Xbox Labs on October 14, 2026, according to posts on Xbox Wire and her X account. The group is described as a small team of game creators, engineers and scientists.

Xbox Labs plans to let players and developers experience new ideas and to share the tools it develops with industry developers. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, who leads the organization, said on X that the best way to find the future of games is to make it, and that details of the experiments will be shared soon.

In a message to employees, Sharma noted that games have been rapidly decompiled and reconstructed in recent weeks, pointing to examples such as Windows games running on Apple Silicon or in browsers. She said the company will maintain a stance of handling IP and its surrounding communities responsibly.

The announcement comes amid recent user attempts to port past titles to unsupported platforms, a topic that has spread on social media as unauthorized ports without rights holders' permission. In the past, Bethesda and Activision took action against an AI-generated recreation of Fallout set in New York and against a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 decompilation plan, according to overseas media Kotaku. In Japan, M2 representative director and president Naoki Horii responded to an unauthorized Mega Drive port of GG Aleste 3, stating that a free port competes with a game currently on sale and could affect future developments, and that even with zero revenue, the company's losses do not become zero.

According to The Verge, Microsoft had not responded to a request for comment on unauthorized IP use by the time the article was published.