- Published:November 19th, 2009
- Comments:No Comment
- Category:Events, Improvements, Meetings, Video, eRepublik V1
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 
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)
