Xbox CEO Asha Sharma stands up XBOX LABS to explore AI-era game decompiling, ports and remixes, saying games suit agents the way coding does

Why it matters

【Key points】

XBOX CEO Asha Sharma sent a memo to all Team XBOX employees on Oct 13, also published on Xbox Wire: she has asked XBOX CTO Scott Van Vliet 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." The team will build in the open, learn from what people do, measure success "by whether more people are playing and creating," and share the tools it builds with developers across the industry.

The memo points to recent weeks in which games have been rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed for: Windows PC builds translated to Apple Silicon or ported into browsers via WebAssembly and WebGPU (which she says is approaching 90% browser support), and big games remixed into another game's source code. Coverage attributes the wave to AI-assisted mods and ports, such as skateboarding in Call of Duty and Halo running in a browser. Sharma calls these "unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models." She ties it to agents: "Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties." People spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, about five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. Priorities are unchanged, including being "responsible stewards of IP." No projects, supported games or dates were announced.

【Verifiable】

Xbox Wire, "Introducing XBOX LABS": https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/10/13/introducing-xbox-labs/

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/news/1010406/xbox-labs-game-decompiling-emulation-exploration

GeekWire (Van Vliet has been XBOX CTO since May): https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-forms-xbox-labs-to-explore-game-remixes-ports-and-other-new-frontiers/

Related on this site: REA tops GitHub (e/794)

【Our read】

1. AI agents have collapsed the cost of decompiling and porting, and a platform holder is publicly choosing to lean in rather than rely only on takedowns. Read alongside Epic's "AI first" pivot the same week, games look like one of the first industries after coding to be reshaped by agents.

2. The memo never uses the word "AI," only "agents" and "emerging ideas," and on IP says only "responsible stewards." The Verge asked about unauthorized IP use and Microsoft did not respond in time; that is the question XBOX LABS ultimately has to answer.

3. For now this is an org change with no product or game list. Watch whether XBOX opens official decompile/port tooling and whether it reaches any licensing arrangement with community mod projects.