We haven’t done one of these in a while! But since I presented on OpenSim statistics at the OSCC conference in December, it seemed like a good time to look back at what happened in the OpenSim community this year.
2025 was a year of dramatic highs and lows for OpenSim. We saw the platform’s largest grid face its most serious crisis in years, watched the metaverse nearly hit one million regions (sort of), celebrated major technical advances, and mourned the loss of one of our community’s most important voices.
OSgrid’s database crisis
The year’s biggest crisis hit in February, when OSgrid announced it would wipe its entire database.
“All avatars that don’t have a backup of their OSgrid assets elsewhere within now and five weeks will irrevocably lose their complete inventory,” OSgrid secretary Foxx Bode told Hypergrid Business at the time.
The 18-year-old database had become bloated and broken, administrators said. “Sixty percent of it is probably never used, and it kills the performance of our state-of-the-art hardware.”
But it got worse. In early March, the grid discovered all IAR files had been corrupted, forcing an immediate and indefinite closure, according to a March announcement. The previously announced March 21 reset timeline went out the window as the grid entered what administrators called “lengthy and meticulous” reconstruction with no specific reopening date.
The emergency closure triggered immediate migrations across OpenSim. Wolf Territories Grid reported over 100 new regions in the days following the announcement, while some smaller grids temporarily blocked incoming transfers to prevent system overload.
“People have strong opinions and think the metaverse is some competition, but we really appreciate the help for our users,” Bode said, while warning smaller grids against accepting more users than their infrastructure could handle.
Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner used the crisis to highlight the importance of proper backup policies. “You have to maintain daily backups of the entire system to enable you to restore it to the last stable state,” he told Hypergrid Business. “If you don’t do this and only rely on data duplication then when a corruption occurs you won’t have uncorrupted copies of the files to restore to.”
OSgrid came back online in April after about a month of downtime. The grid celebrated its 18th anniversary in July with a week-long beach party, then held its annual fundraiser and auction in September.
The nearly million-region anomaly
September brought one of the strangest statistics stories in OpenSim history. An OSgrid user decided to map an entire continent, creating approximately 800,000 regions in the process, according to OSgrid president Dan Banner.
“They were trying to map out North America,” Banner told Hypergrid Business.
This brought OpenSim’s total land area to nearly one million standard region equivalents — at least on paper. For statistical purposes, I adjusted the numbers to exclude this continental project, since including it would make the bar charts absolutely impossible to read.
Major community events
The OpenSim Worlds Fair was held in March on the Wolf Territories Grid. Organized by Cooper Swizzle, Koshari Mahana, Kimm Starr, and Rosa Alekseev, the fair featured 72 parcels for exhibitors and 17 themed entertainment stages.
OpenSimFest 2025 was held in October, featuring events across multiple grids including Wolf Territories, DigiWorldz, OSgrid, Kitely, Tenth Dimension, and Bridgemere, according to organizer Lisa Laxton. The festival introduced a new hypergrid broadcaster system from 0HubRadio.com and concluded with a Burning Women event.
The thirteenth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference took place in early December, with more than 30 panels and presentations. I presented on OpenSim statistics and moderated a panel about AI in OpenSim.
All the presentations are available on the Avacon YouTube channel, on the OSCC 2025 Presentations playlist.
New TV channel launched
This was just announced four days ago — though they also posted a video about it four months ago, which I missed.
NeverTV, a virtual television network launched by Neverworld Grid. The project aims to create a full broadcast network with regularly scheduled programming, all filmed in-world with live studio audiences.
According to their announcement on OpenSimWorld, NeverTV is seeking show hosts, camera operators, directors, news anchors, editors, and program directors. They’re offering select residents their own regularly scheduled programs.
Survey results
In October, I ran a grid survey ahead of my OSCC presentation. The results showed that Littlefield and Utopia Skye received the highest overall scores from their residents, with Wolf Territories also scoring surprisingly well despite being the most active grid with the largest user base.
Between them, respondents had visited more than 50 different grids and named 27 different grids as their primary homes. Kitely was home to the most survey respondents, followed by Littlefield and Utopia Skye.
Looking at the numbers
January started strong, with all OpenSim stats up compared to mid-December 2024. The land area of public OpenSim grids went up by 170 standard region equivalents, active users were up by more than 700, and grids reported over 4,100 new registrations.
Then I took off a few months. Life. Stuff. But I’m back!
Anyway, by year’s end, I was tracking a total of 2,589 grids, with 246 active grids in December. Wolf Territories consistently remained the most active grid throughout the year in terms of monthly unique visitors.
Remembering Mal Burns
But 2025 also brought a tremendous loss to our community. Mal Burns passed away this past summer.
Mal was the creator and host of Inworld Review, the weekly news and discussion program that documented virtual worlds for more than a decade. What started as “Metaverse Weekend Review,” which he co-hosted with his partner Tara, became Inworld Review — the definitive talk show about OpenSim and virtual worlds.
I had the privilege of joining Mal and Tara and other guests from 2013 through early 2017. Week after week, we covered the OpenSim community — grid launches, technical developments, community events, and the people who made it all happen. Mal had an encyclopedic knowledge of virtual worlds and an unwavering commitment to documenting everything that happened across the metaverse.
His last show was on June 22, and you can watch it here.
Mal was known for his curiosity, his dedication to the community, and his passion for exploring new virtual worlds. He gave voice to what was happening across OpenSim, interviewing grid owners, developers, content creators, and residents. Through Metaworld Broadcasting, which he ran with Tara Yeats, he provided production services for virtual world events and created an invaluable archive of OpenSim history.
But perhaps the greatest tribute came in October, when Mal’s close colleagues announced they would continue Inworld Review. The show premiered its first post-Mal episode on October 26, and held a panel at the OSCC discussing “the decision and creative choices to continue the program.”
You can subscribe to the new Inworld Review channel here.
There were several other tributes to Mal Burns this year, including one on Inworld Review itself, and a Neverworld Grid tribute in July and a Hypergrid Safari gathering in October.
There’s also a different video of this event on James Atlloud’s channel.
It’s fitting that Mal’s work continues. For more than a decade, he was the voice documenting our community, helping us understand where we’d been and where we were going. He was a true pioneer — someone who saw the potential of virtual worlds early on and dedicated himself to sharing that vision with everyone who would listen.
The OpenSim community is smaller without him. But the archive he created, the community he served, and the conversations he facilitated will continue to shape this metaverse for years to come.
Rest in peace, Mal. The hypergrid won’t be the same without you.
