Essay · February 2026
The metaverse arrived. It just looks like platforms where people build things together. Nobody wants to hear the word "metaverse" anymore—and that's exactly why it's worth revisiting.
The Metaverse We Have
Meta's $90 billion in Reality Labs losses, failed VR social apps, and the crypto winter buried the term. But the concept underneath—people living, creating, and connecting inside shared digital worlds—didn't go anywhere. It showed up in places nobody was calling "the metaverse." Roblox now has 144 million daily active users, up 69% year-over-year. Minecraft fully deobfuscated its Java Edition source code. Together, they represent over 300 million monthly active users building, modifying, and sharing interactive experiences.
Even Meta pivoted: their $135 billion in 2026 CapEx pours into AI infrastructure, not virtual worlds. Their Horizon Studio now generates 3D worlds from natural language prompts. The path to shared digital worlds runs through AI-powered creation, not VR headsets.
The Composition Crisis
Global games revenue hit $195.6 billion—an all-time record. But player participation has fallen below pre-pandemic levels. Gaming has been losing the battle for attention not to some exotic new medium, but to the existing internet: short-form video, prediction markets, memecoins, the infinite scroll.
This isn't a marketing problem. It's a participation problem. The traditional model—professional teams spending years building individual products for audiences that consume them—produces scarcity, not abundance. And the attention economy rewards the continuous novelty that only comes from massive creative participation. Gaming is losing attention to media forms that give people more active roles.
Products vs. Platforms
The difference between a game and a platform is the difference between making content and enabling composition. A game gives players something to do. A platform gives creators tools to build things that give other players something to do. Roblox's 12.3 million monthly active developers and 44 million published experiences demonstrate the compounding effects of that distinction.
AI is accelerating this shift. Roblox's Cube Foundation Model generates functional, interactive 3D objects from natural language. Google DeepMind's Project Genie generates navigable 3D environments from text. Unity announced AI that creates casual games from prompts alone. The trajectory from "tech demo" to "viable tool" is measured in years, not decades.
The Imagination Bottleneck
Every creative industry moves through three eras: Pioneer, Engineering, and Creator. The explosive growth phase only happens in the Creator Era, when tools let people work from vision to implementation rather than from infrastructure up. Game development has been stuck in the Engineering Era. AI-powered creation is beginning to change that. The bottleneck is no longer engineering capacity—it's imagination.
Read the full essay: Games as Products, Games as Platforms on Metavert Meditations.
Related: Composability · The Direct from Imagination Era · What Is the Metaverse?