Microsoft has unveiled Xbox Labs, a new initiative designed to bring games to more people on more devices, with a particular focus on web browsers. The announcement formalizes the company's ongoing experiments with running Xbox and Xbox 360 titles in browsers and signals a broader push to expand access to its gaming catalog.
The effort supports the goal set by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to reach 1 billion players per day. Xbox Labs will be a small team of engineers, game makers, and scientists tasked with turning emerging technologies into products that players and developers can actually use. According to IGN, the initiative is not just a research and development effort; it is expected to ship products and engage gamers directly. Sharma said the team will «build in the open».
Xbox Labs can be seen as the next phase of backward compatibility efforts that began at Xbox over a decade ago. Those efforts were recently extended through a disc-to-digital program, which allows owners of physical Xbox games to convert them into digital versions. Xbox Labs aims to take that concept further by exploring new ways for games both new and old to be distributed and even created.
The announcement comes amid a growing community of developers and enthusiasts who have ported classic games to web browsers. One notable example is a browser version of Halo: Combat Evolved running at 94 frames per second. Such projects have demonstrated that games can run on hardware they were never originally designed for, using technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU. Sharma noted that WebGPU now approaches 90% global browser support.
In a memo to the team, Sharma pointed to recent experiments in which games have been rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on unsupported hardware, Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon, and games have been ported to browsers. She said these experiments challenge long-held assumptions about the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games.
Sharma also highlighted the scale of gaming compared to other activities. She said people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. She argued that games share properties with software development, making them a natural area for exploring new technologies.
Xbox Labs will share the tools it builds with developers across the industry, according to Sharma. She emphasized that the company's priorities remain unchanged, including its commitment to the «4Cs», making great games, supporting hardware, and being responsible stewards of intellectual property and the communities built around it.
The initiative follows a busy stretch for Xbox, which last week revealed Xbox XP, an arm focused on the entertainment industry. It remains unclear how Xbox might monetize Xbox Labs offerings, whether through upfront costs, in-game microtransactions, or advertising. The company has not detailed specific products or timelines.
For now, Xbox Labs represents a formal commitment to exploring how emerging web technologies can extend the life of older games and bring new experiences to a wider audience. As Sharma put it, the team will «build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating».