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Wed, Apr 14 2010 | 4 Comments

OpenSim grids grow 11% since last month

By Maria Korolov

The world’s top 40 OpenSim-based grids gained 1,055 regions over the past month, from 9,533 to 10,588, an increase of more than 11 percent.

By comparison, Second Life grew just 1.4 percent during the same time period, according to data from Grid Survey.

As usual, OSGrid was the single biggest gainer, with 937 new regions. OSGrid allows anyone to connect a region for free, and also offers an automated region launcher, making it even easier for home-based users to set up their own worlds at no cost.

We’ve begun tracking a few new grids this week, including the historically-themed Heritage Key, and the recently-launched JokaydiaGrid. Other grids that we’re now tracking are Logicamp, My3dWorld, Land of Vikings, DWGrid, FunGrid, Otherland, Cybergrid, and GovGrid, though the last six were too small to make this month’s round-up.

The Nile Image by Loki Popinjay. (Image courtesy Heritage Key.)

The Nile, by Loki Popinjay. (Image courtesy Heritage Key.)

The grid that showed the single largest percentage point increase was Germany’s Wilder Westen grid, which increased more than 500 percent in size, from 6 to 40 regions. Wilder Westen, where both English and German are spoken, is a Wild West-themed region with OMC currency shopping, historic recreations, desert landscapes. Managers plan to roll out Old West-style shootouts and horse races soon.

The biggest loser was Avatar Hangout, which dropped from 142 regions in mid-March, to just 95 regions now. The fall is likely due to the recent ownership change.

Meanwhile, hypergrid-enabled destinations continue to multiply. The Hypergrid Worlds directory is currently tracking more than 40 active hypergrid-enabled grids, with 140 different hypergrid-enabled regions.

April Region Counts

Note: You can browse all hypergrid-enabled public grids with Hyperica, the directory of hypergrid destinations.

About Maria Korolov

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China. Follow Maria on Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn
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Related posts:

  1. Top OpenSim grids gain regions, users
  2. OpenSim Grid List
  3. May 2011 OpenSim Grid Statistics
  • Hallow Palmer

    To say OS grows and use the region count for this is not a good way.

    I know grids, they're explode over night from 200 to 400 regions. 2 days later the regions are back to 200.

    The user count maybe the better choice to say OS grows or not.

  • http://tromblyltd.com Maria Korolov

    Hallow –

    I'm starting to come around to your point of view.

    We've been focusing on region counts since regions cost money — or server space — and user accounts are free. You can create as many accounts as you wish, on most grids, and can also have accounts on multiple grids as well. Regions are harder to set up. At least, I thought they were until ScienceSim ran up 1,000 new regions overnight. As I recall, they ran them on just one server.

    Total user accounts — especially users active in the past month — can give a good indication of trends at least, if not of actual users. And they can show the relative activity on individual grids.

    We'll start tracking them this month, and start posting the totals next month.

    - Maria

  • http://tromblyltd.com Maria Korolov

    Hallow –

    One problem. Cyberlandia is using a distributed grid model — they have a centralized directory of all the regions on the grid, but not a centralized server of user accounts. Everything is linked together via the hypergrid.

    They're clearly a single community.

    As long as it stays just one grid, no big deal. It only throws the data off a little bit. But what do we do if we get a lot of other grids following their example? Any ideas?

    - Maria

  • http://tromblyltd.com Maria Korolov

    Hallow –

    One more problem with trying to track user numbers is that not all regions are disclosing this information. The total regions can be monitored in an automated way, and confirmed by simply visiting the grid and checking that the regions are there — or using a bot to do this.

    There's no way to get either get or verify user information externally.

    – Maria

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