Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has set up a group inside the company called Xbox Labs, and the reason is unusual: the wave of fan mods and ports built with AI. In a note to staff she called these experiments "unmistakably good outcomes for players", even when they challenge Microsoft's own business models. The awkward part is that over the past two weeks Microsoft-owned Activision and Bethesda shut down two high-profile projects of exactly this kind.
What Asha Sharma wrote
Sharma sent the note on Tuesday, and VGC published it. In her words, games have recently been "rapidly decompiled and rebuilt" to run on hardware they were never designed for, Windows PC builds have been translated to Apple Silicon or run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now close to 90 percent global browser support. These experiments, she writes, challenge long-held assumptions about the tether between software and hardware and the boundary between creation and play.
- Who leads it. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, with a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists.
- How it will work. "Build in the open" and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. The tools are promised to the whole industry.
- The main argument. People spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the time Sharma estimates the world spends writing code.
- What does not change. The priorities stay: first-party games, hardware and being "responsible stewards of IP".
Meanwhile, Microsoft's own studios are pulling ports
That last caveat about IP matters more than it seems. On October 11, according to TechPowerUp, Activision used a DMCA notice to take down two browser projects by developer Luckey Faraday: a recreation of Black Ops 2 multiplayer and a Kino der Toten zombies mode, both built on Three.js with AI coding agents. Activision has not commented.
Before that, Fallout: New York went offline. It was a free browser game that, according to its creator, was written entirely by Claude Opus 5.5: 117 locations, 112 characters, a working Pip-Boy and V.A.T.S. The reveal passed 3.5 million views, then ZeniMax, Bethesda's parent company, sent a cease-and-desist over its trademark, and the game was set to private. So for now Xbox Labs looks like Microsoft trying to lead the very thing its own studios are stopping with legal letters.
This hits close to home for us: we regularly cover fan ports, from the native Bloodborne port for Windows and Linux to AnyPS5, which brings PS5 games to PC. If Microsoft really starts shipping tools like these itself, official ports of old Xbox games could get much easier. For now it is a memo, not a product.
Sources
Asha Sharma's note to Xbox staff, as published and quoted by VGC, October 13, 2026. The DMCA against Call of Duty browser ports: TechPowerUp, October 11, 2026, citing Luckey Faraday's post on X. Fallout: New York and ZeniMax's notice: TechPowerUp, October 2026.
Images: Fallout 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II, official Steam screenshots. Xbox Series X photo from Wikimedia Commons by Der. Bellemer, CC BY-SA 4.0.
