Image credit: Microsoft

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.…