Roblox are doing steady incremental progress to their platform/engine.

Epic released Unreal Engine for Fortnite about one month ago.

Meta have some interesting stuff in their pipe.

I think that especially Roblox will shift how the younger generation view games, with more emphasis on social. It is their MMOs.

Is it really much of a shift? Last I checked, Minecraft servers had done pretty well with the generation prior.

Is Roblox really considered the metaverse? I feel like it's just an MMO with a game editor. Not that different than many other games with custom game editors. It feels like a stretch to call this a paradigm shift.

Well, Roblox is almost as metaverse as any metaverse. Metaverse is just a buzzword for MMO's with level editors, that are also supposedly selling land that's worth something, a good place for a corporate themepark and having business meetings with uncanny 3D avatars that sound like your colleagues.

At least my understanding was that popular definitions of metaverse include some type of “reality-based” technology like AR or VR.

Roblox supports VR.

Meta released a near photorealistic avatar demo recently. So they’re definitely progressing still.

In the hardware space openBCI has partnered with Valve and they’re working on an BCI integrated immersive headset called Galea. It runs about $25k+ atm. They’ve begun shipping to researchers and developers and I’ve heard they’re aiming for a consumer line but don’t know of a planned release date.