eRepublik and Advertising

Day 1,028, 12:36 • Published in United Kingdom Netherlands • by Deviltje

Dear readers,

As you all know eNetherlands (not only eUNL) is gonna be dead in a few months, we have 736 citizens(13 september 2010)
eRepublik has 186,565 citizens, which seems to go down day by day.

I don’t know how many real dutch persons play eRepublik but i don’t think it will be more than 1,100 people.

Fact:
99 % of the people in the Netherlands (between 12 and 24) have acces to the internet
( http://tinyurl.com/333yw22 )
I also now that there are also people who are older then 24 who play online games, but i couldn’t find a link.

Most people in the Netherlands play onlinegames for eg Ogame, trivian, Supremacy1914 etc but they don’t play eRepublik.

So why don’t people play eRepublik?

Lets start with the most important thing!

1. ADVERTISING

I have been playing this game for almost 2 years and i really never ever saw an ad from eRepublik on the internet. I have seen them from other games but never an eRepublik ad.
I have seen articles from players in the media in other countries or eRepublik mentioned in game magazines. In the Netherlands i have seen eRepublik mentioned on some fora, but most fora see it as spam and remove the article.

It seems that eRepublik.com thinks that players should make advertisements or get media attention. I and a lot of citizens think this is a job for eRepublik itself. Sure citizens will also do their best to get more players but in some countries its really hard.

So i had a look at the login screen of eRepublik and looked at what sites/papers said about eRepublik:



At least 2 years old...
But there is also a press kit (something i wanted to send to a dutch magazine together with an article)

http://www.erepublik.com/en/press

The press kit is from April 2009!!!! I know not much has changed since then... only V2 came not really important.
Ok i thought well maybe just send some screenshots from the press page. A screenshot from the battlefield for eg:



HUH???
We have V2 but eRepublik.com press site is still in V1...

Not usable for sending it to magazines etc.

eRepublik.com wants more players cant say they do anything for it.


2. eREPUBLIK IS BORING

Yes boring, you click a few times and its done. What made eRepublik.com some what populair was the community behind it. Countries made their own forums and IRC channels that made citizens stay in the game. 99% would have quited after a month when countries didn’t do it.

I would have expected that the admins would listen more to the citizens as the citizens made the game to have a great community. Not something the admins did. The admins created it and failed to listen to the citizens when they started V2.

And now we see the effect... Citizens quit and not just 1 or 2.

I am sure there are more things that made eRepublik.com kill itself but these 2 are the most important.

eRepublik.com has had the opportunity to grow, but they failed at at least 2 major points.


Deviltje