Second Life Grid Size – Steady As She Goes

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s weekly grid report breaks the news this week that the Second Life grid size has remained static for a second week in a row, although the net number of private regions grew by one sim, this was cancelled out by one Linden owned region disappearing.

The current scores on the doors are a total number of 26,178 regions on the Second Life grid, with  19,195 being private estates and 6,983 being Linden owned.

Now to get this shift in fortunes into some sort of perspective, let’s compare the scores on the doors during the first few months of 2012, 2013 and 2014.

2012

In the above table we can see that overall losses were over 900 regions in the first few months of 2012, coming in at just under 3%. This table is a little bit odd because there were a higher number of Linden owned regions disappearing than we’ll see for 2013 and 2014, but this table is also the one with the largest losses for private regions too, both in numbers and percentage wise.

2013

Here we can see that losses were still rather high with a net loss of over 500 private regions, but that in itself was an improvement on the early part of 2012, although the figures look disappointing there is indication of a slow down with a net loss that is almost 300 less than a similar period in 2013.

2014

Here we can see that the slowdown in net region losses is getting quite significant. A net loss of just 78 private regions as opposed to the 523 in 2013 and the 811 in 2012 is extremely impressive. That’s just 9.61% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2012 and just 14.91% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2013.

I can shed no light on why there has been such a dramatic slow down in region losses and I haven’t studied the churn of regions. There are still a number of regions disappearing from the grid each week but they appear to being replaced.

However World Of Warcraft has also been experiencing something similar, in their case with subscribers. Massively reported in February that the number of subscribers to WoW has risen from 7.6 million in November to 7.8 million in February. A small rise but it seems that their net losses have been levelling off too. Maybe there’s a bigger picture at play here.

Whatever the reasons for the slowdown in net losses, it’s welcome news, let’s hope it continues, although I do have to finish with my traditional message:

The Tier is still too damn high and the sooner Linden Lab get creative about this, the better.

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