It’s a weird time for gaming at the moment – mass layoffs, studio mergers and game developers increasingly using AI has made the future of the industry somewhat unpredictable.
But with AI becoming accessible on an unprecedented scale, people have started to use the tool to combine the different source codes of games.
Almost any game can now be fused together with AI – a process that would take game developers years to do. The most popular combination at the moment appears to be Minecraft and Elden Ring, with the new amalgamation making for a bizarre gameplay experience that sees Steve take on the likes of Messmer the Impaler.
But for better or worse, these experiments have caught Xbox’s attention, and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has just announced a new division in response to these mash-ups – Xbox Labs.
Xbox aren’t the first developer to toy around with AI, at a recent tech conference Capcom revealed that the next step for its in-house game engine would be fusing it with AI.
However, in a statement on X, Sharma expanded on the purpose of Xbox Labs, directly referencing the mash-up of games circulating online: "Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
"These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games.
"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.
"As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have."
View oEmbed on the source websiteThe promise to share the work of Xbox Labs across the industry is ambitious, and the creation of the division will certainly raise some eyebrows. Not necessarily because of the AI aspect, but because Xbox is opening this division in the wake of mass industry layoffs where many iconic Xbox studios were slashed.
What the work of Xbox Labs will actually involve is vague, but the move into AI experimentation shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering Sharma’s previous position as the president of Microsoft's CoreAI product organisation.
It seems like Xbox and Capcom, among other developers who will likely follow, are caught up in the AI game development rat race.
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