OpenSim Regions Grow, Activity Declines as Summer Heat Heats Up – Hypergrid Business
The total land area of OpenSim’s public grids increased to over 33,000 area equivalents this month, with a new large grid added to the list. However, the total number of active users dropped by nearly 1,500 this month due to several grids not reporting statistics. The missing grids included Fire and Ice, The City, and Little Big City.
The new large grid is called Simation Grid, and it has a reported area equivalent of 25,408. The architecture of OpenSim makes it easy for grid owners to get started with plenty of space. Or maybe it’s a statistical mistake. The grid website says “Standard area equivalent: 25,408 km2”, and if the area is actually expressed in square kilometers, then the total area is 387,693, which is more than all other OpenSim grids combined. I couldn’t find any contact information on the grid website, and some of the pages seem to be placeholders. So if you’re the owner of Simation Grid and you’re reading this, and I got the numbers wrong, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com and I’ll update this article!
We are currently tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 318 are active and 258 have published statistics this month. If you have a statistics page that we are not tracking, please email us at maria@hypergridbusiness.com so that your grid can be mentioned in this report each month, giving you more visibility both to search engines and users.
This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area with 33,554 standard area equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active with 6,540 unique logins in the last 30 days.
Our statistics do not include most grids running on DreamGrid, a free and easy-to-use version of OpenSim, as these are typically personal grids.
OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform similar to Second Life that allows non-technical people to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for the more technically adept, or other distributions, with commercial hosting starting at less than $5 per location.
A list of OpenSim hosting providers is available here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get OpenSim world or local content here.
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Top 25 grids by active users
For general purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is that the busier the better. People looking to make new friends will go to the grid that already has the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grid with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience will get the idea.
The 25 most popular grids this month:
- Wolf Territories Grid: 6,540 active users
- OSgrid: 5,168 active users
- GBG World: 2,333 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,163 active users
- Alternative Metaverse: 1,967 active users
- Double Life: 1,838 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,718 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,521 active users
- Trianon World: 1,108 active users
- AviWorlds: 1,028 active users
- AviVerse AlterEgo: 987 active users
- Neverworld: 962 active users
- Littlefield: 935 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 840 Active Users
- AvatarLife: 837 active users
- Moonrose: 825 active users
- Astralia: 771 active users
- Craft World: 744 active users
- Herederos Grid: 582 active users
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 545 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 537 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 524 active users
- Groovy Verse: 522 active users
- Kitely: 462 active users
- Barefoot Dreamers: 438 active users
The biggest change on this list was the addition of a new grid to the database, Virtual Vista Metaverse, which has been well-received since its release.
Online marketplace for OpenSim content
Currently, Kitely Market has 20,965 product listings including 41,073 product variants, 35,835 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 628 OpenSim grids to date.
As you can see in the chart above, almost all of Kitely Market’s growth has come from content that can be exported to other grids. This is the green area on the graph. The red area of non-exportable content has remained flat for the past eight years.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available for OpenSim. It is accessible for both HyperGrid-enabled and closed private grids. Instructions on how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are available here.
Kitely recently upgraded their version of OpenSim, improving startup time and improving compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.
New grid
The following grids were added to the database this month: Agartha, AmaziWorld, Casperia Prime, Gridworld, HG Safari Grid, Nosso Lar, Sciattisi Grid, Simation Grid, Steg, Tenth Dimension.
If you know of a missing public grid, please email maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
hanging grid
This month, the following nine grids are marked as discontinued: Aingrid, Hermopolis Chimera, Cantarovasta Grid, Kindred Spirit World, Pseudospace, Rocket World, Royal Grid, Starfleet, and Tropicana Grid.
If it doesn’t come back online in the near future, it will be marked as closed in future reports.
Grid may change the login URI or website address. If so, please notify us by email and we will update the database.
Top 40 grids by land area
All area numbers in this list are based on standard area equivalence where possible. Active user counts include HyperGrid visitors where possible.
Many schools, companies, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.
Here is the raw data for this month’s report. Here is a list of all active grids. And here is a list of all HyperGrid-enabled grids and HyperGrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful when creating HyperPorts.
Here you can see all past OpenSim statistics, including polls and surveys going back to 2009.
- OSgrid: 33,554 locations
- Wolf Territories Grid: 29,276 Territories
- Simulation Grid: 25,408 regions
- Kitely: 18,108 locations
- ZetaWorlds: 12,932 locations
- Alternative Metaverse: 10,437 Regions
- Groovy Verse: 8,201 locations
- Discovery Grid: 4,945 locations
- DigiWorldz: 3,527 locations
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,260 locations
- Tag Grid: 1,464 locations
- Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 locations
- Friends Grid: 1,040 locations
- GBG World: 957 locations
- Virtual World Grid: 915 Regions
- ArtDestiny: 900 locations
- AviWorlds: 841 locations
- Craft World: 673 locations
- Kinky Haven: 669 locations
- AvatarLife: 594 locations
- Littlefield: 513 locations
- GorGrid: 430 locations
- Furry World: 373 locations
- Virtual World Zones: 364 locations
- Neverworld: 348 locations
- DreamNation: 308 Regions
- Nemesis 3D: 305 locations
- EdMondo: 300 locations
- Insight Concepts: 240 locations
- Open Virtual World: 229 locations
- Darkheart’s Playground: 218 locations
- Japan Open Grid: 188 locations
- Counter Earth: 186 locations
- Carter and Friends: 185 locations
- MisFitz Grid: 183 locations
- Adreans-World: 173 locations
- OpenSim Fest: 140 locations
- WestWorld Grid: 135 locations
- XTalent: 133 locations
- GerGrid: 132 regions
Do you know of any other grids that are publicly available but not in our database? Please email us at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.