eRepublik is celebrating today its second year anniversary. We would like to share our joy with those who have made it possible, our more than 230,000 currently active citizens.
In October of 2009, www.erepublik.com received over 6.9 million visits and 158 million page views. During the past month citizens spent over 96 million minutes navigating the eRepublik world.
Join Plato in the celebration and serve yourselves a piece of our anniversary cake!
eRepublik is now officially available in four more new languages (French, German, Russian and Portuguese) thus making its interface and the game experience itself more enjoyable for thousands of our citizens. More languages will be added in the coming weeks.
This week we took another important step forward towards putting our citizens in the center of the game-play, by improving their chances for interaction with the alpha release of our in-game chat tool. Check it out, create your own chat room, favourite those where you had the most interesting discussions or ideas, visit the Beginners chat room to learn the basics of the game through other players an share your experience during your first days as an eRepublik citizen. Check out the National chat room for your country where you are likely to discuss the hottest political issues affecting your nation.
Our co-founder and CEO, Alexis Bonte, was invited this week to take part in Madrid at the International Forum on Digital Content (FICOD 09). FICOD has become a benchmark meeting point for professionals involved in television, cinema, music, interactive digital entertainment, animation, education, audio-visual production, digital publications, user generated content (UGC), social networks, blogs, interactive advertising, etc.
Alexis took part in one of the official program roundtables “The Games We Get Caught Up In: Online Interactive Digital Entertainment and Digital Content Distribution” (Check the video here) along with other relevant figures of the sector such as Nils Henning, CCO and Owner of Bigpoint GmbH, or Thomas Lee, Senior Director of Business at Gamepot. Alexis had a chance to discuss the important changes that are being experienced by the videogames industry.
Alexis Bonte also had a chance to have an informal discussion with videogame players and experts in the ARSGAMES “User Generated Critics” roundtable, insisting on how online games were moving the power balance in the industry from the companies to the users.
eRepublik celebrated as well its own gathering/workshop, with the presence of some relevant citizens from eSpain. (See photos) where the official launch of the chat was announced as well as previews of national goals and the upcoming improved economical module as we well the new more visual PvP military module. More detailed pictures on this to come in a future insider and blog post. (Plus probably in some fan sites as quite a few citizens had undercover cameras 
eRepublik, the massively multiplayer online social strategy game, has recently exceeded the 200,000 active citizen mark with more than 600,000 citizen accounts created since day one of the New World. That means that one fifth of a million real people, are keeping their citizens alive by playing regularly. This is double the size of the population that was active in eRepublik at the end of March 2009, just six months ago.
“The eRepublik team is very proud of this achievement. This is the result of two years of hard work, passion and dedication to this project, which aims to offer our citizens a fun time and lots of new friendships,” comments Alexis Bonte, Co-Founder and CEO of eRepublik.
“Of course, we would not have been able to turn eRepublik into such an interesting game without the help of our citizens, whom we thank. We are proud of having a dedicated community of people who have helped us develop the game we all envisioned,” adds George Lemnaru, Co-Founder and CTO of eRepublik.
The global conflict taking place in the New World is one of the reasons for the late baby boom that has caused the population of several countries within eRepublik to grow significantly. Word of mouth between citizens and friends has gathered together many new players in an attempt to increase the number of inhabitants in certain countries as well as the ranks of their armies. What is so impressive is that eRepublik’s growth is primarily user driven. Its players are so emotionally involved in the game largely due to their national pride, their friendship with other users, or just because they care for their virtual job, business or newspaper within the New World.
Coincidentally the official newspaper of the New World, the eRepublik Insider, recently celebrated its 200th issue of the international edition with its more than 124,000 subscribers. While it is the main newspaper in eRepublik, there are over 40,000 user generated newspapers which themselves have thousands of subscribers, making for a very active media.
To view the full press release click here. You may also visit our press page for full press coverage.
About a month and a half ago, we launched Citizen Ads within eRepublik. Many games opt to run external advertising within their games, which can often be irrelevant to users and/or just plain distracting. Rather than take away from the game experience, we realized that our users themselves have plenty that they want to share with other users. Why not let them advertise their efforts to each other? After all, this is something citizens were already doing via newspaper articles and in-game messages. Adding internal Citizen Ads would not only make the game more rich and interesting, but would allow users to more easily advertise their businesses, political campaigns and many other efforts. It in fact makes the eRepublik world more similar to the real world by allowing people to differentiate themselves by advertising their unique efforts to each other.
We never could have imagined the creativity that would have come from the citizens. The ads are relevant, entertaining and really invite you to be more involved in the game. There are some seriously great advertisers out there. I started saving some of the ads a few weeks ago when I began to come across some really creative ads that made me do the following: laugh, my jaw drop, just stop and think, and most of all CLICK.
You can see that there are a few very entertaining and creative ads above. The very last ad was actually posted due to the recent World War that virtually wiped the US off the map, leaving many citizens trapped behind enemy borders. Usually, in order to get trapped US citizens back on to the remaining US soil, it would have involved lots of news articles and private messages, but now, trail blazing citizens posted ads to encourage trapped citizens to return to their homeland. It’s because of these ads that I myself moved from Texas, Indonesia to Florida, USA….good to be home!
Creating a Citizen Ad is incredibly easy, it just takes three simple steps which involve you creating your ad by making it look and say what you want, targeting your ad by choosing your audience, and lastly, budgeting your ad by deciding how much Gold you want to spend and on how many impressions. Then citizens can further manage their campaigns via the “Advertising Department” section. Starting an ad is easy and costs nothing to users other than eRepublik’s in-game currency, Gold.
We are tremendously excited to not only see the Citizen Ads being successfully used by citizens of the New World, but even more excited that it has made the game more interesting and complex.
Overall Gamescom (trade day August 19th) was very interesting, the traditional industry was out in force with giant stands in spite or maybe because of a drop in sales of about 33% YoY in June / July.Online players were a lot more discrete, only present in the trade area. Interesting when you think that this where most of the growth will be coming from over the next 5 years. The only MMOG players that were out in force with a large stand were WoW and Dofus (ok and Wharhammer was kind of there to within the giant EA stand and the conference org seems to like Twitter).Most of the big releases that were announced were for traditional offline games with a lot of interest for Avatar and the new Starcraft. Dofus 2.0 was the only major MMOG announcement. In terms of the offline games that I felt were interesting was Ruse from Ubisoft, a wargame that looked really cool. I also had a series of very interesting meetings but I can’t talk about them yet. :o)
Just before GamesCom there was a GDC conference and from an online perspective I think the following were probably the most interesting talks as reproduced by Gamasutra:
Playdom VP panel on social gaming
Gameforge CEO, Klaas Kersting Keynote (great guy by the way, a real industry leader)
About a month ago, eRepublik promised that the New World would receive its deserved and much needed professional map. A map to mirror rapid changes that occur in the New World. A map to show you how big an empire is, or what enemies surround the region you live in. A map to show you the richest regions of eRepublik, as well as the most populated ones. A map to develop military strategies as well as a map for managers searching productive regions. The New World is so dynamic and evolves so quickly, that the ability to track details at such levels is key.
The new map is live showing you the eRepublik world like you have never seen it before. You can not only zoom in to see countries and their regions, but it gets much more granular - you can view the population, resources, and even constructions (such as a hospital or defense system) in a particular region. You can filter by country, and then even filter further by viewing a country’s active MPP`s (mutual protection pacts) and trade embargoes. The handy map can also be filtered easily by type of map - politically (to see the normal map by countries/regions), by population, by active battles, by resources, and by constructions. You can even filter by date - you might be interested in seeing how the world looked a week ago, or a month ago, etc. Nothing simpler, just select the desired date, and you’ll see the world configuration as it was back then.
Considering the complexity and ever changing landscape of the New World, a map of this caliber is going to be a huge asset to the New World. It’s certainly fascinating seeing the eRepublik world take shape - check out the map below - I currently live in Texas, Indonesia!
Carsten Kisslat, a game designer, writer and producer with almost 16 years of experience in the videogames industry, has joined the eRepublik Labs team as Lead Game Designer. Based in London, Kisslat has worked as an interactive entertainment consultant on games for PC, mobile, Nintendo DS, in addition to taking part in the development of award winning games such as: Gothic (PC), Gem Jam Fever (Mobile) and The Fall (Mobile).
“We are delighted to welcome Carsten Kisslat as eRepublik Labs’ Lead Game Designer. His award winning background in game design for all types of game platforms will be key in helping us to improve the gameplay experience of eRepublik.com. As Lead Game Designer, Carsten will report directly to me and be responsible, with his team, for designing new eRepublik.com game modules as well as future games,” says Alexis Bonte, Co-founder and CEO of eRepublik.
“I think browser gaming in general, and eRepublik especially, has great potential to change the way people play computer games. eRepublik’s mixture of Web 2.0, social gaming and strategy gameplay is a really innovative approach. It’s the perfect time to join the team and to help bring eRepublik to next level,” states Carsten Kisslat.
To view the full press release click here. You may also visit our press page for full press coverage.
Recently, a veteran member of eRepublik, Big Brother, decided to “sit down” and chat with eRepublik’s Co-Founder George Lemnaru. Given Big Brother’s history in the New World, his objective for this was not only to ask Geor
ge many of the questions that the community has been eager to get answers to, but also to make his already informative site just that much more interesting.
His questions ranged from personal to probing - from George’s typical day and favorite eRepublik memories, to new features and where George sees the game a year from now. Big Brother asked some pretty intense questions, and George answered.
When asked about his most memorable eRepublik experiences, one of the moments he shared was regarding the tension between Romania and Hungry both in-game and in real life, saying that, “…in the middle of the RO vs. HU war, the real life president of Hungary met with the real life president of Romania.” This was particularly impressive because it showed that people “do consider eRepublik -and especially the war module- as just a game and that in real life we are friends.” As far as his favorite in-game experience goes, George shared that he actually can’t play eRepublik, but can only work and vote, something that causes him “frustation.”
A summary really doesn’t do it justice, so be sure to read the full interview here.
Big Brother hopes to do more team interviews in the future.
eRepublik Labs announced today that it has reached the milestone of one million unique visitors per month, only eight months after the release of its public version. Given the popularity of the game, it is no surprise then that the massively multiplayer online social strategy game has also recently been ranked 22nd on the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 startups list. This is a constantly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. The Index is focused on mobile and web companies in the EMEA region. The scores and rankings are based on a sophisticated algorithm using information pulled in from thousands of online sources about early stage companies: traffic, mainstream media, funding information sources, the blogosphere, and other key factors.
eRepublik has also earned the title of “highly commended” (2nd place) for the TechCrunch Europa award of Best Entertainment Application or Service (EMEA). Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.
“We are certainly overwhelmed by the level of recognition we are receiving from the industry,” says Alexis Bonte, Co-founder and CEO of eRepublik. “We are really happy that both our community and the experts agree in the potential of our game. This is great affirmation for us as we keep developing and improving the New World.”
Among the latest developments in eRepublik is the citizen ads module, which allows players to advertise products or ideas within the New World. This new feature is an exciting addition that will not only make the game more dynamic, but will help it to even more closely resemble the real world.
“I can’t wait to see the first political campaigns for the next monthly elections in the 60 countries of the eRepublik world. I expect that with the addition of the citizen ads that the elections will be quite disputed and that new political parties will emerge,” says George Lemnaru, CTO and Co-Founder of eRepublik.com.
The New World’s social based game play allows it to spread virally in terms of content and users, with almost no distribution and content creation costs. Listening to its community, the eRepublik team has been able to make regular releases, adjust game-play, try new things and add new features so as to increase the vast number of options players have to interact among each other. Now, after recently celebrating its 600 days of existence, over 430,000 citizen accounts have been created and eRepublik has an active community of over 140,000 people who play frequently enough to keep their citizens alive and well. In June of 2009, www.erepublik.com received over 4.2 million visits and 103 million page views. In addition, during that month, citizens spent over 60 million minutes navigating the eRepublik world.
To view the full press release, click here. You may also visit our press page for full press coverage.
