IT之家 news, October 14: As AI-assisted game modification and recompilation technology rapidly rises, Microsoft has formed the XBOX Labs team to explore the application of new technologies in game development.
In recent weeks, more and more mod makers have used Claude's latest Opus 5.5 model to mix content from different games, for example letting Mario experience platform-jumping gameplay in Elden Ring, and even porting Call of Duty to run in a web browser.
According to foreign media VGC, on local time the 13th, XBOX CEO Asha Sharma pointed out in an internal letter to employees that the wave of AI-generated game content is changing people'straditional understanding of the boundaries of game development. To this end, Microsoft has formed a team dedicated to exploring new technologies and new ideas.
Sharma wrote in the letter: 'In recent weeks, we have seen some games, after rapid decompilation and rebuilding, even run on hardware that originally did not support them.'
The letter mentioned thatWindows PC games, after conversion, can run on Apple's in-house chips and can also be ported to browsers with the help of WebAssembly and WebGPU. WebGPU's support rate among browsers worldwide is close to 90%.
Sharma admitted that even more surprising, content from many world-famous games has evenentered the source code of other games. 'These attempts are challenging long-held assumptions in the game industry, including the binding relationship between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and the ways players discover and experience games.'
She further noted that it is hard to predict how the game industry will develop in the future. 'But making great games accessible to more people, giving old games new life, and letting more players participate in game creation is certainly something to look forward to. Even if these changes disrupt our existing business models — sometimes precisely because they break the original models — they will undoubtedly benefit players.'
To explore these possibilities, Sharma tasked XBOX CTO Scott Van Vleet with leading the formation of a small team, made up of game developers, engineers, and scientists, responsible for turning new technologies and new ideas intoresults that players and developers can actually experience. 'We will carry out our development work in the open, learn from everyone's practice, and judge success by whether more people participate in gaming and creation.'
IT之家 attaches part of the memo below:
I believe XBOX has great potential in this area. Programming became one of the earliest areas of widespread application for agents because it can write, run, and test software. Games share many similar characteristics. People spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated total time spent programming worldwide.
Over the past 25 years, we have accumulated rich game development experience. I hope our developers can participate in the exploration and unlock greater potential from these new technologies. As the exploration deepens, we will, as always, share the tools we build with developers across the industry.
Our work priorities will not change. We will continue to advance the 4Cs strategy, build great games, grow the hardware business, and properly manage intellectual property, maintaining the player communities that have formed around that intellectual property. XBOX Labs allows us to explore new technologies while continuing to advance our existing work.