There’s a funny little semantic war happening in tech right now and creators know this better than anyone.
Half the industry is still clinging to the old labels, games, apps, content, like they’re safety blankets from a more predictable era and that stands to reason in my mind.
The other half is quietly muttering a new word under its breath like a cult chant and that word is… Worlds.
If you’re like me and you’ve been watching the AI, XR, and on-chain space closely in late 2025, you’ll know exactly why. There is a fundamental shift happening and its not a hype-cycle dopamine rush, or a big influencer shill topic, and its also not ‘metaverse is back but trust us this time’ as a narrative either. Its a small vocabulary change that signals a paradigm change.
Since the early days of me looking into worlds, it’s changed a lot, and I will explain why.
The World Is Tilting Toward… Well, Worlds
You don’t need a big CT account telling you, VC dinners, or tech company leaks to see the pattern.
Just open your eyes and look at the last 18 months of product announcements, research papers, and the staggering sums of capital flowing into “synthetic experience” technologies.
Here’s the numbers and the data that matter:
$6.2B pumped into AI-generated scene & environment tools since 2024.
(Luma, Runway, Hiber, Inworld, Pika, Scenario)
How the hell did that get passed everyone. Its a lot of money into what some of us have been focused on for years and its because, well, its inevitable. The difference now, is that the tech is better, it can make it happen faster, easier and for a lower cost.
52% year-on-year increase in “spatial compute” spending across enterprise and consumer.
(Headsets. Sensors. SLAM systems. Vision models.)
You should already be seeing the trend here. Alternate worlds built with AI assistance, key. Creator platforms with AI tools, winners.
340% growth in models fine-tuned for autonomous agents inside simulated environments.
(Personal AIs, NPCs, companion agents, autonomous creators.)
I mean at this point, the hints are more like semi-trailers barrelling at you head on down a highway.
Over 420M generated 3D scenes published across consumer platforms in the last year.
(Most never seen, most forgotten but creation exploded.)
We know this first hand. And the problem is that most of the early scenes are not persistent, can’t be accessed again after being closed or exited, or don’t have multiplayer, or don’t have chat, or don’t have avatar creation. This is exactly why we focused on WebXR and building the shell that would allow for no downloads, viewable through a simple link in VR, on mobile or PC, full multi-player, chat enabled, permanent spaces, geared for full autonomous agent integration.
What does this data tell us? People are not building apps anymore, they are building realities and they are starting to develop quickly.
Games don’t describe what is being built, and apps don’t explain it either and content can be as generic as TikTok or a grocery list, without context.
Worlds is the only word that fits.
The Psychology Shift. Worlds Are High Intent, High Meaning, High Frequency
There’s a reason every tech lab keeps defaulting to ‘worlds’ in their language:
- Runway’s documentation: ‘world models’
- OpenAI research: ‘simulated worlds for emergent behavior’
- Hiber: ‘build worlds instantly with AI’
- Luma: ‘AI-generated worlds at cinematic fidelity’
The positioning is very clear and its extremely timely. Worlds means something to us and it triggers things inside of us, because it implies scale, presence, persistence and its something you participate in and don’t just consume, that’s the killer difference.
It’s actually, if you want to put it simply, a shift from content, to context. Apps give you tasks, games give you goals, content gives you moments. Worlds give you meaning and meaning, that’s sticky as hell.
Why Your Tech Isn’t ‘Games,’ ‘Apps,’ or ‘Content’, It’s Worlds
Let’s take something like Orange Web3’s ecosystem as an example, not because it needs hype, but because it’s the perfect case study for the era we’ve entered.
You can’t describe, virtual spaces or social rooms, persistent environments, XR integrations, worlds that spawn from prompts, AI agents deploying agents on the fly, a chain logging every interaction as on-chain memory and identity and XP that travel between experiences, if you are using ANY of the old web2 vocabulary. You simply can’t do it.
Case and point would be if you try saying ‘app’ to describe an AI-generated social space that updates in real-time with every interaction. Or try calling it ‘content’ when NPC agents are evolving behaviors inside it. Or try calling it a ‘game’ when it becomes a location where thousands of micro-experiences live simultaneously.
I’ve thought about this for years and I’ve sat in hundreds of rooms trying to explain it, and it’s like describing a spaceship as a really fast bus. Which is technically correct but completely wrong.
The Data Says the Same Thing
Here’s what the usage and creation trends from 2024–2025 make painfully clear:
1. Virtual spaces outperformed traditional mobile gaming in session time by 2.4x.
People don’t want levels, they want places.
2. 3D generative creation tools saw 518% growth year-over-year, the largest creative explosion since the smartphone camera.
People don’t want apps, they want environments.
3. AI companion agents now sit on 67M weekly active users globally.
People don’t want content, they want relationships. As much as some of whats being built makes my mind boggle, it is what it is and data always rules the roost.
4. VR/AR/XR usage is up 312% since Apple Vision Pro + Meta Horizon synergy began accelerating.
People don’t want screens, they want immersion. And let’s pause here for a second, one of the key push-backs for the early metaverse push was, by building environments and alternate realities it implied we were like Ready Player 1 and trying to escape a dystopian world. You still with me here?
When you put these together, you get one conclusion, the unit of the future isn’t more apps, its the WORLD.
Worlds Are the New API
This is the deepest part of the shift. Im not very technical myself but even I understand this, worlds aren’t merely experiences they’re interfaces.
Humans won’t be navigating rows of icons or scrolling through apps and not a moment too soon if you ask me. Every time someone says “I have a new app”, I get a phantom vibration of my pager going off on my hip.
Instead, they’ll be navigating, rooms, spaces, scenes, environments and you guessed it….Worlds.
It will be the exact same way that websites replaced brochures, and apps replaced websites, feeds replaced apps and worlds will replace interfaces, its programmed.
We’ve already seen the preview to the main event and its highlighted by kids spending more time in Roblox, Fortnite Creative, Minecraft servers than all Hollywood films combined. Let that really sink in for a moment. When you can fully create experiences that take these platforms to the next level, a lot of the things we do today will be remembered the same way we remember having to rewind VHS video cassettes or hyper color t-shirts, phones we dialed with our fingers and lining up in person to pay bills.
And now AI is dragging their behavior into adulthood.
AI-Generated Worlds Are The Next Creative Industrial Revolution
AI-generated worlds are becoming the default format of digital expression which is why all the big players have it in their verbiage. You might not be there yet, or still grasping what it all means, but its happening, and like a Final Destination movie, the signs are everywhere, if you care to look.
In 2026 onward, you won’t create a slideshow, instead you’ll create a room, and you won’t create a video, you’ll create a scene, instead of an app, you’ll create a space and instead of a game, you’ll create a world and this changes everything.
When this happens, creation becomes faster, distribution becomes richer, ownership becomes on-chain, memory becomes persistent, identity becomes portable, agents become inhabitants and you guessed it, users become citizens.
That’s a world, it’s not a file.
So Yes, Words Matter, But ‘Worlds’ Isn’t Branding, It’s Reality.
Let’s cut the fluff. You can call your tech ‘games’ if you want and we do because it feels safe and people understand it, heck we have all spent hours and days of time playing them.
You can call them ‘apps’, because again, everyone knows apps and they are familiar and comfortable.
You can call it ‘content’ and it’s broad and it’s easy and we all know its digestible. However, we all know this isn’t the future, these are present but soon to be past concepts and phrases.
The shift happening now, in compute, in AI, in XR, in on-chain systems, is not a shift of features, it’s more of a shift in form. If you want to sum it up and close it out, its all about worlds, experiences and realities that we can be a part of, belong to and tailor to our liking. There, I said it before and I am saying it again now, the future is worlds.
See how easy it is to build them and join them by clicking here. No downloads, no special device needed and they look great in VR on ANY headset.
See you all in a world, one day very soon.
Why “Worlds” Is the Only Word That Makes Sense for What’s Coming Next was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.