Summer slowdown on the hypergrid

By:
On:
Tagged:
With: 5 Comments

The total land area of OpenSim’s public grids increased by almost 3,000 regions, but active users dropped by 405.

The total number of standard region equivalents on the public grids is now 59,339, up by 2,821 compared to last month, the largest single-month increase in almost two years.

The total includes estimated numbers for AviWorlds, since they did not respond to requests for information. To get this month’s number, we added the number of new regions to last month’s total. This would result in an undercount of regions if any of the new regions were variable-sized regions.

OSgrid had the largest size increase, with 1,941 new regions, then Kitely with 427 new regions, followed by the Atek Grid with 239 regions. Virtual Life Brasil gained 213 new regions, more than tripling in size. Starlight World gained 210 new regions, and DigiWorldz gained 148.

The total number of registered users reached 552,863, a gain of almost 11,000 new registrations, the highest monthly increase in more than a year and half. The total number of active users was 34,379, down by 405 from last month.

Total land area on OpenSim's public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Total land area on OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

For those who are new readers, OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Popularity

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is: the busier, the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience… you get the idea.

InWorldz gained the most active users this month, 422. ZanGrid gained 118, AllCity gained 99, DigiWorldz gained 97, Virtual Life Brasil gained 89, and Kitely gained 74. Both AllCity and Virtual Life Brasil are Brazilian grids.

The Great Canadian Grid lost 251 active users, possibly due to a spate of denial of service attacks that caused grid outages. The grid also lost 152 regions.

Top ten most popular grids:

However, the hypergrid as a whole is beginning to function more and more like one large grid, with an increasing number of multi-grid events, communities, and groups.

Active users on the hypergrid, InWorldz, and on other closed grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Active users on the hypergrid, InWorldz, and on other closed grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)

Transitions

The following 34 grids were marked as suspended this month: 4Addiktion Grid, Anda World, Austria Grid, Avares, Bearly a Grid, C4 OpenSimulator, Eureka World, Fantasy World, Galaxylandia, Habitat7, Hiro’s PC, Kotori, Majickal Network, MajWorld, Micachee 1, Montefiorino, Moses, Nichtort, NurbsHouse, Paradise World, PeerWorld, Pixel Planet, Planet Einstein, Psychedelia, R5Academy, Serenity, SimValley, Six Sides Grid, Tyland, United Kingdom, University of Cincinnati OpenSim Virtual Campus Grid, Virtual College of The Siskiyous, Virtual Designers World, and Yugen World.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, and is marked closed when it shouldn’t be, please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

June Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,158 different publicly-accessible grids, 278 of which were active this month, and 219 of which published their statistics.

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here.

Maria Korolov
Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)