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
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.
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!
Several weeks ago, we made available a citizen-narrated French version of the tutorial. We thought this was a great idea - considering that Plato himself has currently only been available to narrate the Spanish and English versions of the tutorial (available on www.erepublik.com), we thought it would be great to make it available in more languages with the help of citizens. So we asked our ambassadors if they could help translate and record more tutorials in their native languages. Below are some of the first that we’ve developed, which include Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian. We hope these citizen-narrated tutorials will help more eNations have an equal opportunity to grow in the New World. Thank you to the ambassadors for your help with translating and recording!
And below is a Latvian version that we came across.
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 George 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.
So far we’ve created the official eRepublik tutorial in both English and Spanish - as those are the two languages in which eRepublik has so far been officially translated. However, one helpful citizen, Colansi, has gone the extra mile (or kilometer, if you will) to create his own French version of the existing tutorial. Plato obviously wasn’t free for the gig (he’s still taking French lessons), so Colansi took it upon himself to create the French version below. Once we have the site live in other language versions, and Plato finishes his studies, we’ll be making official versions in other languages, but for now, we hope this French version will be of assistance.
A special thank you to Colansi for his work (French speakers should be sure to visit his browser game site, jeux-alternatifs.com).
The Europas are all about celebrating the tech scene in Europe - and we couldn’t be more excited or honored to be a nominee for one of the Europa awards. eRepublik has been nominated for Best Entertainment Application or Service. The awards will be held on July 9th in London and will recognize and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year (Summer 08 - Summer 09).
So, if you’re a fan of eRepublik, please take a quick moment to vote for us!
A lot of water has passed under the proverbial bridge since January. You remember Jan. don’t you - those dreaded days of complete and absolute downtime? An eery silence covered the New World that time. Under an invisible force, the New World surrendered to a deep deep freeze.
I know, because even though eRepublik was inaccessible to the rest of the world I could still login from our internal network. I diligently did so each morning. I went to work, trained, read the same newspaper every day, scrummaged for food in the once bustling marketplace and in the late evening looked on as the sun set over the New World.
The same deafening silence echoed throughout the entire network. There was still ringing in my years from the day before. You could hear processors thundering furiously, disks spinning like tornados and an entire Universe of photons and electrons being shoved through optic and ethernet pipes. Indeed, a symphony of creation - an orchestra that tirelessly played on, with no intermission, no encore and now … with no spectators.
If that sounds dramatic to you it very well should because, for us, the architects of the New World, there’s no other way to better summarize it’s beauty using mere words. The eAlpha and eOmega - we set the rules and establish what’s wrong and right, where down and up are, where the Sun rises and sets.
But why has everything gone quiet? Where is everybody? Why couldn’t the symphony play on?
The very next day everybody dug into their figurative trenches and prepared for the long battle ahead. Blasting away at their keyboards around the clock, feverishly fighting an enemy force they could not see or comprehend: the embodiment, as it were, of their own success.
Volumes of computer code to sift through in one sitting - they make their stand, facing their own creation. Many bottles of cola fell that day and hot coffee stained the land while the fight raged on through the night. Close to a million lines of code and comments not counting frameworks. What took thousands of man hours to put together now had to be unraveled and reassembled in less than a day.
I can’t even begin to overstate the sheer grunt and effort, blood, sweat and tears that went into this massive undertaking: hour after passing hour galloping ahead of deadlines until the wee hours of the morning.
That night, the foundations for what has grown into today’s New World were laid down. And that night, the New World came back to life but at a cost. For you see, what seems like a faceless collective of “we” everybody lovingly refers to as “Admin” is comprised of individuals like you and me, with their good and their bad, real characters.
Friendships were tested that night: some of them survived and bonds strengthened but some didn’t make it. It’s important to bring that up. It’s technology with a human touch. It’s technology with a soul and passion. It’s the difference between the inanimate and the divine breath that brings it to life.
Bill McKenna, famous motorcycle racer, once said: “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, totally worn out and proclaiming, WOW, WHAT A RIDE!”
Fast forwards six months later: bruised, battered, mistakes made, lessons learned and far more to experience still, the New World is blossoming and the Sun has yet to set again.
We are very happy to announce that we have closed our Series A round of funding, raising 2 million € from AGF Private Equity, and also that Guillaume Lautour, who is a partner at AGF PE, is joining our board.
We will be using these funds to hire more talent to the existing eRepublik Labs team of 30 in order to further develop our first strategy MMOG www.erepublik.com and prepare new ones.
You can find more details in our press releases below, and also in the the video interview I did with Guillaume yesterday evening in the Dublin airport, as well as the video of George and myself (guess where we shot the video…).
A big thank you to all the people involved in making this happen and to our eRepublik community for supporting us and helping us build www.erepublik.com. This is just the beginning…
ge many of the questions that the community has been eager to get answers to, but also to make his already informative 
