"I think Xbox has an important role to play here."

Image credit: Xbox.

Xbox is reacting - uncharacteristically quickly - to the deluge of vibe-coded game ports, decompiles and recompiles we've been seeing online in recent weeks by establishing Xbox Labs, a new initiative seemingly designed to explore the phenomenon.

Xbox Labs was announced by CEO Asha Sharma in a message sent to staff and published on Xbox Wire . The initiative is led by Xbox chief technology officer (CTO) Scott Van Vliet, who previously led Azure for OpenAI at Microsoft.

So what is Xbox Labs? The announcement doesn't give a clear answer, with Sharma seemingly going out of her way to avoid mentioning AI or generative AI in the language.

"In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support," wrote Sharma.…