Statistics: Second Life, OpenSim, World of Warcraft

Hypergrid Business keeps many of us up to date on happenings in the OpenSim side of virtual worlds. They currently have an article up on expansion and contraction in the OpenSim worlds: Regions, grids hit new record highs.

Garden Party

Garden Party by Gorba McMahon, on Flickr

It is a good headline. In the first paragraph Maria, author, points out that active users on public grids fell by 909 to 30,000. So, even though I consider Maria a bit of a fan-girl for OpenSim, I consider her reporting accurate enough to give us the good and bad news. 

She points out the migration of users from private-closed grids to the open, Hypergrids. Users in general prefer busy grids with people to meet and be customers.

The state of things in OpenSim is still … sparse. They talk of growth on new ‘fast’ growing grids in terms of ‘hundreds’ of new users. Also, several grids lost users. Second Life™ stats are showing a decrease in peak concurrent users logged in last month and it looks like this month will show an even lower peak. So, it seems all the current virtual worlds have challenges.

The question of seasonal use comes up in the article. That has been debated for years. In my 2014 Second Life Review I published my stats. They show a seasonal cycle. So, it seems reasonable to assume OpenSim also has a seasonal cycle.

This morning OSGrid has 65 users logged in and 5 Hypergrid visitors. At the same time Second Life has 41,554 concurrent users. These are not impressive numbers. But, it is hard to find numbers about concurrent use in most other games.

World of Warcraft has a Census page. Users have a game mod they can add that feeds data into the stats system. We find there are less than 400 peak concurrent users per day per realm (shard, I think). The average is about 200±. There are about 245 realms and 251 European realms. Or 596 realms total. That gives us 200×596= 119,200 … concurrent users… I think. I’m not a WoW player and my friends that are aren’t into stats, so I may have misunderstood the numbers.

This puts OpenSim and Second Life use in some perspective. Getting the possible concurrent players in WoW adds a new dimension, I think. I thought WoW would have had way more concurrent sign ins. SL is at about 38% the number of WoW players… our average and WoW’s average. Salt the numbers.

5 thoughts on “Statistics: Second Life, OpenSim, World of Warcraft

  1. Great post ! Thank you.
    Peak concurrent users on WoW are more than that, probably in the range of 1-2 millions. Here are some stats on some games: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
    At the time of writing Dota 2 is above 800k. Interestingly Garry’s Mod is at 38k, quite in the range of Second Life.
    And here also are some old stats : http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/PCU-1.png
    (source: http://mmodata.blogspot.fr/)

  2. “Seconde life have 41000 users”. Sorry but how many user is online on seconde life ? We cant see statistic from second life , i dont think they have more of 1000 résident active.

    • Second Life has an API for accessing the number of users currently logged on. Notice the user count shown on the Firestorm splash screen. We currently see from 29,000+/- logged in at 2-3AM to 60,000+/- logged in at 2-3PM PT.

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