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.

The 100 Best Xbox Games of All Time View 101 Images 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, and now Xbox Labs aims to take it even further.

[Excerpt from Asha Sharma's memo]: 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... 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. These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play... 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.