Lani Global posted a very interesting prediction graph on Twitter on 3rd January for OpenSim vs Second Life for 2014. The graph prediction shows that OpenSim will continue to grow faster than the Second Life grid between now and December 2014. If trends continue as they are then this prediction will be correct for 2014. I hope that there will be a increase of regions/private estates for Second Life during 2014 and for new opensim grids get noticed more.
Latest grid numbers for OpenSim vs Second Life
- 30,214 regions on OpenSim (as of 16th December 2013)
- 26, 227 regions on Second Life (as of 5th January 2014)
OpenSim Vs Second Life 2014
Here is a graph published by Hypegrid Business for 2012 and 2013 showing increased growth in OpenSim grids. Again a decline in total Second Life regions.
OpenSim vs Second Life regions 2012 and 2013
What are your predictions for 2014 OpenSim regions Vs Second Life regions ?
Daniel Voyager 
Apples and oranges.
Each Region in in SL represents a financial investment, and implies that people use it.
Each region in Opensim may or may not represent an investment (I have 4 regions on my desktop as I type this -3 sitting idle) and do not represent anything other than someone unpacked and ran opensim.exe
If you want to compare numbers -compare concurrency instead (thought it’s questionable how meaningful that is -especially if grids began to use NPC’s to game the numbers).
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Thanks, Han. Yes, that’s true about each region having financial investment. So perhaps if Linden Lab lowered the tier that may increase region investment right ?
Last year there was far more interest for opensim grids but Second Life did get many improvements during 2013 from the lab.
Check out > http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2013/12/top-40-grids-pass-30000-regions/
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We hash that out pretty regularly on SLU (latest discussion is on this thread, starting on page two: http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/91154-after-few-years-sl-feels.html) and the consensus is that if you lower tier, the land barons will bail, and the Lab will lose its’ profits.
My point is that people tend to make this comparision between region numbers in SL and region numbers in Opensim, when they mean two completely different things -so it’s misleading.
I’m not sure what a better basis for comparision is -the best I can think of is concurrency but that has its’ flaws. All I know saying that “opensim has more regions than SL” when those regions are (often) free and under-used leads to an inaccurate comparision.
We need tools that tell us how many people stay in SL, and for how long, and how often they repeat visits. IE, the same sort of tools that websites use. But that would be against everyone’s interests (against SL’s interests, because it would highlight the fact they’re in decline, and against opensim’s interest because it would highlight exactly how much of a fringe demographic it is) so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see any sort of accurate comparision.
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Thanks, Han. 🙂
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Secondlife private regions has dropped below 20,000 to 19,241. The numbers above include Linden owned regions. This exaggerates the SL numbers in comparison to Open Sim.
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Thanks Wizard. OpenSim still wins for the most regions and this trend will continue for the next few years. Second Life needs more investment and a complete revamp.
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The total number of OpenSim regions includes also a large amount of empty grid owner land. I know some grids, where almost half of all regions are not used at all.
There are a lot of grid owners who would do everything to be in Maria’s Top 40 sugarcoat list. 😉
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I think you can not compare Second Life and OpenSim. Neither the number of regions nor in the number of users.
Second Life is a product, a world consisting of a single, unified grid.
OpenSim is a server software and not a grid. What you can do with this software is to operate completely different grids. There are open grids, closed grids (walled gardens), commercial grids, private mini-grids, instant grids with “on demand” regions and standalone regions.
To throw all regions and/or users of all OpenSim grids into the same pot and compare it with Second Life is nonsense. That’s about the same as if North America would say we have a larger population than Cuba. 🙂
But the OpenSim users obviously feel better if they can say: “Look, we are larger than Second Life”.
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Thanks Gordon.
Well that seems to be the case “Look, we are larger than Second Life”. There is far more interest in the top 40 opensim grids etc.
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Graphs should start at zero. And you are comparing things that do not correlate.
For example, I have one sim I pay close to $400 a month for in SL, with 135 visitors today. I have 9 sims in OpenSim that cost nothing and 5 are empty. I had 3 visitors. You tell me what that means.
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Thanks Ferd.
I didn’t make the graphs shown above and all I wanted is to point out the totals for each platform as we head into 2014. It’s going to be another interesting year to see if Second Life will pick up somehow or continue down the path of no-return.
Yes, OpenSim seems to be the better option at the moment.
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If this is meant to suggest anything to do with the relative success of the two platforms… I’ll be filing this in a folder called “boneheaded charts” in accordance with the comments above which resonate exactly with what I was thinking. Thanks for posting though 🙂
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Thanks Becky.
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Another gloom & doom prediction but lets look at a few facts
Opensim is still in Alpha not even Beta with 1000’s of showstopper bugs the software is fragmented with an undirected developers group this will not change for years into the future.
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2013/12/grids-vendors-pitch-in-to-support-opensim/
http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view_all_bug_page.php
Opensim grids mostly do not even meet secondlifes performance standards so to tell people its a good alternative is not fair just try crossing regions in osgrid or dealing with lag in metropolis or getting harassed by kitelys owner on forums or getting service from a bad hosting provider were nothing works right, the list just goes on and on.
The only alternatives that have real people with software that is comparable to secondlife is avination & inworldz with inworldz being the top of them because they were willing to fork and spend the time and effort to make it stable while avinations is not far behind, the secret is both function as a cheaper secondlife with good support that’s not dependent on opensim they developed in-house the changes needed this has to do with software we are not talking about plug in modules that anyone can make.
If secondlife stopped running tomorrow in 2 weeks everyone would be in opensim but by 4 weeks they would be offline or on another platform.
Oh i did forget Sim on a Stick why bother just have your own grid at home its what opensim is suppost to be ‘free & no cost’
http://www.simonastick.com/
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Thanks Punky for your comment.
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I have 5 regions on Osgrid, that by far receive much more visitors then the small parcels of mainland i own on Sl or our private closed sim there:)
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Thanks zzpearlbottom.
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This graph wasn’t made with psychic powers …it only used mathematics.
The graph is a smoothed extrapolation of “virtual land size” based upon the past few years of published region data. The graph simply compares the most reliable metric we have: the number of total regions in Second Life’s grid, versus the number of total regions in the top OpenSim grids.
It is probably best to think of this as a way of looking at the total size of the metaverse available to Third Party Viewer (TPV) users.
A touch of humour for the naysayers in this discussion:
“If you don’t like the math, go out and make some of your own.”
“You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.”
As a side note: The actual number of OpenSim regions is believed to be at least 10% to 20% larger than the total reported by the largest OpenSim grids. This made up primarily of non-reporting OpenSim regions run by educational institutions, non-profit entities, private entities, or individuals.
Thanks for posting this, Daniel.
–Lani Global
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Thanks Lani and again thanks for posting that graph of OpenSim vs SL.
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Another prediction graph for your enjoyment:
“2014 Prediction: Total Size of Combined OpenSim Plus SecondLife Metaverse Hits 65 Thousand Regions of Virtual Land!”
Click here to see graph:
/large.
This can be though of as the “total size of the metaverse” available for Third Party Viewer (TPV) users to experience.
Graph Description:
The left side of the “virtual land size” graph (year 2013) is a display of factual information. The data is derived from region numbers reported by the Linden grid and various popular OpenSim grids. This is shown as solid lines.
The right side of the graph (year 2014) is mathematical prediction based upon continued growths/losses of regions at the same rate seen in 2013. This is shown as dotted lines.
–Lani Global
PS: Please don’t shoot the messenger. Lani Global doesn’t create this data, she just uses math to make graphics.
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Thanks for sharing the graph 🙂
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All the men pretending to be women are fleeing to OpenSim, because there is no Voice there.
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Thanks Arduenn.
Hmm…
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Surprised you would post this kind of open sim propaganda of another ‘Great Grid Collapse’
250,000 regions they can have but same amount of active users as today.
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Thanks E.L
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This whole discussion rather misses the point, but only by so far. The real problem with comparing opensim to SL involves a lack of centralization of opensim grids vs. that of SL.
When you go to SL, all available regions are present on one map; in other words, they represent a single community. This is simply not the case with opensim.
Before you can genuinely move beyond a simple comparison of landmass into such demographics as user to landmass ratios, user retention, etc., we need to be able to compare communities to communities. Hypergrid goes some distance in making a single community of opensim deployers and users, but it is still a bit hit or miss; before we can present the sort of monolithic profile against the metaverse ‘horizon’ that SL does, we have to be unified in that same sort of ‘on the map’ social sense, especially as we seem interested in how much landmass is used by how many users and how regularly or for how long at the stretch.
TL-DR;
You can’t satisfactorily compare opensim deployment to SL because SL is a single installation and opensim deployment is many installations.
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Thanks Hiro
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OSgrid has voice one and i do believe many other grids, so the assumption that users use Open sim cause they don’t have voice is utterly wrong!
The fact is a simple one, users that do wish to make money of virtual worlds will deny Open sim free grids, the credit they deserve!
As for commercial grids, then SL is and will be the leader and for long, don’t get fooled!
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If Linden Lab was smart they would lower tiers for their sims and rethink the TOS. A lot of designers are leaving SL for this.
I have to pay 361 REAL DOLLARS for my sim, every month, that’s a lot of money ! (21 % tva because I live in Belgium-) The day I can’t earn that money anymore, I’ll send my sim back too. LL is killing inworld business with their Marketplace too, so many designers and shop owers are giving back their sim. Why keeping a sim if 80 % of your customers buy in MP? Was SL not ment to be a social platform?
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My soul mate has 1 shop at Nautilius, one at Snug harbor, another atSansara and even if 99 pct of her sales are from marketplace she believes that to be able to see her product and try it in world (some of their builds are vehicles!) is some she will not want to let go!
And the problem of tiers is cause many didn’t realize yet that after recent changes, crossing sims are smoother as never before and mainland can be real a choice, as any private state that has more then 1 sim connected (See Blake Sea, see all mainland with access to it, See bay city and several other mainland communities!
So Linden lab just needs, not to lower tiers, but to allow landlords to move and connect their sims to mainland if open access!
Mainland or private sims that are devoted to allow susers to travel in between, without the use of teleport, as now, the big advantage stil for Sl is just that, smoother crossing sims and huge mainland continents (Where in any other viertaul world, one could travel without a single teleport use, for 2 hours, without visiting the same region once?)
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A follow up post with new graphs and the dark metaverse in 2014 > https://danielvoyager.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/updated-graph-on-size-of-the-sl-and-opensim-metaverse-2014/
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