Xbox has announced Xbox Labs, a new initiative aimed at getting games to more people in more places — with a particular emphasis on web browsers.
No doubt seeing the growing community of games getting improved versions ported into web browsers (like the 94fps browser version of Halo: Combat Evolved), Microsoft itself is keen to get in on the action in support of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s goal of reaching 1 billion players per day.
Xbox has been tinkering with running Xbox and Xbox 360 games in browsers, and the Xbox Labs initiative is a formalization of those efforts that will see a small team of engineers playing with emerging technologies in order to find new ways for games new and old to be distributed and even created. And IGN understands that this won’t just be an R&D effort; rather, Xbox Labs is tasked with shipping products – Sharma says, “We’ll build in the open” – and getting gamers to engage with them.
I’d suggest thinking about it as a next phase of the backward compatibility efforts that started at Xbox over a decade ago, which the recent disc-to-digital program built on (which, side note, is a much more consumer-friendly path towards the seemingly inevitable digital future than what Sony is doing), and now Xbox Labs aims to take it even further. It remains to be seen if or how Xbox will look to monetize its Xbox Labs offerings, be it via an upfront cost, in-game microtransactions, or in-game-ad-based revenue.
The Xbox Labs announcement continues a busy stretch for Xbox, which revealed its entertainment-industry-focused Xbox XP arm last week.
Here’s Sharma’s memo to the team (also posted to Xbox Wire) in full:
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.