- Published:August 27th, 2009
- Comments:No Comment
- Category:Improvements, eRepublik V1
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)
