Equipment,
The first video games emerged about 75 years ago. Since then, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them on, and best of all, more people than ever playing them. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and in return, we’ve helped shape the industry, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, along with franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen games quickly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed for. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or adapted to run within a browser via WebAssembly and WebGPU; the latter is now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps most surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the world’s biggest games remixed into someone else’s source code.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the connection between software and hardware, the boundary 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 more accessible, breathing new life into old games, and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unequivocally good outcomes 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 creators, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We’ll build outdoors, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those 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’ll share the tools we create with developers across the industry, as we always have.
Our priorities are not changing. 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 work already underway.
asha
