I'm tired, readers
As part of Microsoft's ongoing, physics-ignoring push to do more business with thousands fewer staff, games chief Asha Sharma has announced Xbox Labs: a new umbrella for Xbox's R&D into the kind of game remixing and rejigging most visibly characterised by viralities like Halo for browsers, or Mario in Elden Ring. Both enabled, perhaps tellingly, by the AI-driven decompilation of the original source codes.
This might not be entirely what Xbox Labs is all about, and Microsoft have clarified to our smarter-dressed cousins at GI.biz that AI usage won't be mandatory (as it's reportedly becoming for Epic Games development). Still, the lack of specific action plans in Sharma's introductory statement leave some between-the-line reading to do.
"In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support," Sharma writes. "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. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another."
Rather than calling the lawyers – assuming they too haven't been laid off – to stop DIY decompilers republishing Halo or adding skateboarding to Call of Duty, it seems Xbox Labs want a piece of that hot, bot pie themselves. "To explore these possibilities," the statement continues, "I’ve asked Scott [Van Vliet, Xbox's chief technology officer] 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."
The kindest possible reading of this would be that Microsoft are using the ability to quickly unlock and pick apart old source code to, say, make classic games playable on newer PC hardware, or make their newer games more easily moddable. Realistically, I suspect the thinking is more along the lines of 'What else can we put Master Chief's helmet-face on?' and vibe-coding accordingly. Xbox's campaign of redundancy carpet bombing has repeatedly been justified as part of an effort to refocus on 'core' franchises, hence Obsidian being put to work on a new Fallout while Playground Games and Turn 10 have been merged, at the cost of the Forza Motorsport sim racing series, to zero in on the more popular Forza Horizon. New ideas? Yeah, they're cool or whatever, but how about Gears of War running in Edge?
The irony is that mashup projects and alt-publishing methods would be genuinely interesting, or at least harmless fun, were they not constructed with the aid of lying machines that boil the Earth and make basic technology unaffordable. Decompiling projects have of course existed within games for yonks, often for the purposes of creating unofficial PC ports, though the introduction of AI has been a fairly recent development. Proponents say this drastically cuts down the time it takes to convert a game's source code in human-readable, editable code, though Banjo Kazooie: Recompiled developer DarioSamo is unconvinced, arguing that devs are already capable of "getting a recomp running in less than a day" with non-AI tools, and that a largely automated approach risks ignoring the additional work involved with ensuring a recompiled game runs stably.