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.
