OpenSim still has over 900,000 region equivalents and why the metaverse should care

An aging open-source world quietly expanding its virtual territory faster than most corporate metaverses ever promised

A schoolteacher in Ohio boots up a spare laptop, downloads OpenSimulator, and one quiet evening spins up a replica of Manhattan as a single experiment in scale. A few weeks later a volunteer on OSgrid finishes stitching provinces together until the map looks like a continent, and someone notices the region counter has gone nuclear. The scene is oddly familiar to anyone who has watched hobbyist clouds outgrow intended uses and become infrastructure by accident. If a hobby can generate a continent, it can also create new market dynamics.

The obvious reading is that OpenSim is a quirky outlier, a niche haven for hobbyists and nostalgics that does not matter to big metaverse businesses. The overlooked angle is that sheer land scale, low cost of entry, and exportable content create a persistent platform-level asset base that rivals purpose built metaverses for creator supply chains, testing, and cheap real estate experiments. That matters when tens of thousands of small creators and dozens of micro business models decide where to build first and scale second.

What the data actually says about OpenSim land

Hypergrid Business reports that OpenSim reached an astronomical total of about 973,193 standard region equivalents recently, a spike driven largely by an OSgrid user modeling continental North America. (hypergridbusiness.com) Land counted this way includes many low use or experimental regions, but raw capacity is real and growing month after month.

OpenSim is an open-source virtual world server stack that supports many independent grids. The project maintains a public grid list and a loose federation model that lets worlds interconnect, which explains how tiny hosting projects can be discovered and measured alongside larger commercial grids. (opensimulator.org) This decentralized architecture amplifies small creators more than many centralized platforms do.

Why land area, not user counts, is the story here

Platforms such as OpenSim let people run regions on cheap hardware or even home servers, so land can be created at marginal cost near zero. That flood of cheap land is noise if the goal is daily active users, but it is a powerful resource for testing, rehearsing events, and offering low-cost rentals to niche communities. This is an economic model second place metaverse firms rarely factor into their plans, because few of them will let you spin up an urban grid for pocket change and an evening of configuration.

Kitely Market shows how commerce can piggyback on distributed hosting by delivering content across hundreds of grids, making exportable assets a force multiplier for creators. Kitely’s marketplace tools and delivery history demonstrate that a scattered land base can still support functioning creator economies. (kitely.com) If creators can buy once and deploy everywhere, land quantity matters more than a single platform’s daily active user headline.

How this compares to blockchain and corporate metaverses

Blockchain metaverses built around LAND tokens offer scarcity by design, and projects such as The Sandbox use curated sales and brand partnerships to create premium demand. The Sandbox has reported large landholder counts and millions of accounts as it builds creator tooling and token incentives. Those platforms monetize scarcity; OpenSim monetizes abundance and cheap persistence. Both have value, but the playbooks differ in predictable and sometimes useful ways. (sandbox.game)

Meanwhile Decentraland’s documentation shows a capped supply of parcels and explicit ownership rules that make its LAND economically different. When a platform imposes hard limits, land becomes a speculative asset; in OpenSim, land is utility and testbed. Businesses choosing a platform need to decide whether they want scarcity for marketing or utility for rapid iteration. (docs.decentraland.org)

The competitors metaverse strategists should watch

Second Life, The Sandbox, Decentraland and other closed or tokenized worlds still dominate headlines and brand deals, but an ecosystem of open grids offers a different competitive threat. Corporations thinking about event pilots, training simulators, or low cost prototypes will compare a token sale budget to the near zero cost of a private OpenSim grid. That decision is not about glamour but about procurement and iteration speed, which surprisingly often beats hype. The irony is that the most sensible choice sometimes looks like doing a startup’s job for free.

A standout quote for the feed

A platform that lets a volunteer model a continent overnight rewrites the rules of what counts as accessible virtual real estate.

Practical implications for businesses with 5 to 50 employees

A five person marketing agency can rent three OpenSim regions for under five dollars a region per month and stage a week long product launch simulation with clickable demos and avatar host staff. That same pilot on a tokenized metaverse could cost thousands for parcel acquisition, creative production, and marketplace fees, making OpenSim the pragmatic lean parallel runway. A 20 person training provider can host recurring instructor led sessions on ten contiguous regions, simulating community layouts and measuring flow before paying for premium space elsewhere.

If an hourly employee cost is 40 dollars, and renting a full featured region from a commercial host is 10 dollars a month, then two months of continuous testing on three regions costs less than one day of staff time. That math explains why small organizations will seed a lot of activity in OpenSim first, and migrate winners later. Small teams can be nimble and pay for attention, not for land scarcity.

The cost nobody is calculating

Cheap land creates operational debt. Regions abandoned after short pilots accumulate configuration cruft, outdated permissions, and orphaned content. That digital garbage adds long term moderation, backup, and export costs if projects later need clean transfers. Someone will eventually have to catalog, audit and consolidate those experimental islands into production estates, and that reconciliation work is labor intensive and poorly priced by the market right now. The free testbed has a maintenance tab that most finance officers have not yet opened.

Risks and open questions that stress test the hype

Counting regions does not equate to counting engaged communities. Many OpenSim regions are empty shells used for tests, art projects, or private play. The OSgrid continent model also highlights how single users can distort headline metrics, so comparing region counts to DAU without normalization is misleading. Data hygiene and consistent measurement standards are not sexy, but they are essential when the numbers inform investment and product roadmaps.

Interoperability questions remain. Export permissions, content licensing, and intellectual property enforcement vary widely between grids, so a cross-grid business model needs robust legal and technical safeguards. If a firm intends to resell experiences across grids, it must budget for repeated QA and permissions audits. Also, reliance on volunteer-run infrastructure introduces sustainability risk for mission critical operations, which is why most enterprise pilots will still prefer managed hosting when going live.

Where this leads the industry next

OpenSim’s expanse is a practical reminder that an open, abundant metaverse exists parallel to the curated, monetized metaverse. Savvy businesses will use each for what it is best at: token platforms for scarcity driven brand plays, and open grids for scale experiments and creator incubation. The result will be an industry that learns to mix scarcity and abundance rather than choose one over the other.

Key Takeaways

• OpenSim’s near one million region equivalents creates a massive utility playground for testing and low cost pilots that corporate metaverses cannot match on price.
• Exportable creator marketplaces make distributed land economically useful, not just empty pixels.
• Small teams can run realistic pilots for less than a single day of staff time when they choose open grids wisely.
• Hidden maintenance and legal costs mean cheap land is not free land forever.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can a small company test a virtual event without spending thousands on land?
Rent a few OpenSim regions from a hosting provider or run them on inexpensive cloud instances to stage a private pilot. Use exportable content from marketplaces and script simple interaction flows to validate user experience before committing to premium platforms.

Is OpenSim a threat to tokenized metaverses like The Sandbox?
Not directly in terms of brand visibility, but OpenSim offers a cheaper and faster place to prototype experiences that could later be tokenized elsewhere. The platforms serve different business needs; they are complements rather than exact substitutes.

Can content move between OpenSim grids and platforms like Decentraland?
Content portability is possible within OpenSim grids and through manual exports, but moving to blockchain based platforms requires different asset formats and on chain ownership models. Plan for conversion and legal checks if cross deployment is required.

What are the main operational risks of using OpenSim for business pilots?
Volunteer run grids introduce uptime, moderation, and support risks. Also, inconsistent stats and one off projects can distort measurement; include contingency and consolidation budgets in pilot plans.

How should a 10 person creative studio budget for a month of virtual world testing?
Budget for modest hosting, basic design assets, staff hours for setup and moderation, and a small QA buffer for content export. In many scenarios the hosting line item will be under 200 dollars while staff and content account for the majority of the cost.

Related Coverage

Explore pieces on creator economies, platform interoperability, and virtual land valuation on The AI Era News to understand how abundance and scarcity are shaping business models. Reading about tooling and AI-assisted world building helps teams decide where to prototype and when to go premium.

SOURCES: https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2025/11/opensim-still-has-over-900000-region-equivalents/ , https://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List , https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2013/08/30/kitely-market-is-open-for-business/ , https://www.sandbox.game/en/blog/the-sandbox-announces-open-publishing-and-new-100m-sand-game-maker-fund-at-its-first-global-creators-day-held-in-hong-kong/3381/ , https://docs.decentraland.org/docs/