Team,
The first video games appeared around 75 years ago. Since then, there have been ups and downs, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them on, and best of all, more people than ever before. This growth has helped make XBOX what it is today, and we’ve helped shape the industry in return, from the introduction of hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions together.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen games quickly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed for. Windows PC versions have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run in a browser via WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter of which is now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprising is that we’ve seen many of the world’s biggest games have been remixed into someone else’s source code.
These experiences challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the connection between software and hardware, the line between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it’s difficult to predict the future of gaming, it’s easy to see the possibilities of making great games easier to access, breathing new life into old games, and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are undoubtedly good results for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I asked Scott to create XBOX LABS, a small group of game designers, engineers, and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into experiences our players and developers can experience. We will build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by how many people play and create.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding has become the first major workload for agents, as they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of these same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, about five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We’ve spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game creators to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we will share the tools we build with industry developers, as we always have.
Our priorities do not change. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to creating great games, to our hardware, and to being responsible stewards of intellectual property and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technologies without abandoning the work already underway.
Acha
Gn tech
