What Is Xbox Labs? Microsoft's New Team Explained

Xbox Labs is the most interesting thing Xbox has announced this year, and I still can’t tell you one thing it’s going to make.

Asha Sharma, who runs Xbox, announced it in a memo to staff on the 13th of October, and Xbox Wire published the whole thing. It describes “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists” whose job is to turn new ideas into something players and developers can try. The person setting it up is named only as Scott. No surname, no job title, just Scott. Fair play to Scott.

What it’s for

The memo gives three goals: making great games easier to get at, giving old games new life, and letting more players become creators. It also says Labs will “build in the open”, and that success gets measured by whether more people are playing and making things.

The reason it exists is the interesting part. The memo points at things people are already doing without Xbox: games being decompiled and rebuilt for hardware they were never made for, Windows builds running on Apple Silicon or inside a browser, and games being remixed into other games’ source code. That’s Microsoft looking at what the community has done and deciding it would rather be involved.

You can see why. Less than two weeks after that memo, fans got Forza Motorsport 5 and 6 running on PC. That project has nothing to do with Xbox Labs, and the memo doesn’t mention it or Forza, but it’s exactly the kind of thing the memo is describing.

What it actually is right now

There’s a website, and I went and had a look. It’s a little terminal screen that calls itself LABS.EXE, version 0.1.0, with a CRT mode and the line “Let’s play with what’s next”. It’s a lovely bit of design, and as someone running a site named after the stuff in old monitors, I can’t really complain. But that’s all that’s on it.

As of today I can’t find a single project, release date or playable test. I also couldn’t find any follow-up from Xbox since the memo, though it has only been eighteen days, so that’s no scandal.

Why I’m not sold yet

The good news is the attitude. A company of this size saying these projects are good for players, even when they challenge its business, isn’t nothing.

The memo is careful though. “Our priorities aren’t changing” is in there too, along with a line about looking after IP. So this is a small team trying things out, and not a new plan for Xbox. The bit that matters most to me, giving old games new life, runs straight into the problem it can’t experiment its way around. For a lot of older games, racing games especially, the rights to the cars and music are what’s in the way, and no amount of clever engineering fixes an expired licence.

One old game properly back on sale because of this team would do more than any memo. Until then, it’s a nice website.