Spooky season brings more visitors to OpenSim worlds

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It’s the spooky season here in the United States, with Halloween coming up soon and all sorts of creepy scary stuff happening, and cooler weather outside. Also — we’ve got the elections. So, three reasons for people not to want to leave their house and spend time in OpenSim as well.

Or maybe there’s another reason why active user numbers went up. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the public OpenSim grids gained more than 3,000 new active users compared to this time last month. However, with grid outages and stats changes, total registered users dropped slightly — and land area went down by the equivalent of 24,000 standard regions.

But the drop in land area is easily explained. Simation Grid, which reported 25,408 regions last month is now down to 1,024. Simation is a tiny grid — well, not in size, but in users — with just 3 actives this month. So the land area was most likely a test of server capacity. That happens. People try to see how many regions they can cram into a server, play around with it for a while, then eventually shut it down. After wall, why keep servers running for regions nobody is using?

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 301 were active this month and 233 published their statistics. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Oct. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

As you can see from the chart above, the Simation regions created a spike in land area this summer, but the land growth is now back to normal levels.

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills 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 either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

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

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Top 25 grids by active users

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Wolf Territories Grid: 7,122 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,910 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,435 active users
  4. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,206 active users
  5. DigiWorldz: 2,186 active users
  6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,980 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,593 active users
  8. AviWorlds: 1,081 active users
  9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
  10. Neverworld: 965 active users
  11. Trianon World: 963 active users
  12. Astralia: 943 active users
  13. Moonrose: 916 active users
  14. Littlefield: 862 active users
  15. Party Destination Grid: 807 active users
  16. AvatarLife: 735 active users
  17. SunEden Resort: 692 active users
  18. Great Canadian Grid: 675 active users
  19. Craft World: 673 active users
  20. Groovy Verse: 597 active users
  21. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
  22. Kitely: 523 active users
  23. Gentle Fire Grid: 499 active users
  24. OpenSim Fest: 432 active users
  25. Eureka World: 427 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 21,048 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,164 product variations, 35,920 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 632 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 13 grids were marked as suspended this month: Angel Souls, Free Life, Insight Concepts, New Life Italy, Nordlicht Grid, OB, Phantom Rose, Pineapple, Planet, ProxyNet, TinkerLand, Trans Sidera, and TUIS Open Grid.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

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. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.

You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Maria Korolov
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