Join the new world

Q: To start off, what does a typical day at the office look like for you?
First of all, one thing that I love about what I do, is that typical days are hard to find, but if there would be a day without a deadline, or without a major event going on the eRepublik world, it would look something like this:
Wake up at 8:30, eat my cereals and go to the office.
check my emails, a big part of my work is to respond to/send emails.
check the weekly plan and make sure that people are on track with it, analyze their problems and find solutions.
meanwhile I ask the community officers and the testers about new stuff.
check my shouts, private messages, working (in game).
if I don't leave the office later than 8pm I go to the gym.

Q: As a company with the aim to make profit, what is your current financial position? On a monthly basis are you still running at a loss or breaking even? Are there plans to attract more investors to the project?
I can say that on a monthly basis we are not profitable; we are running at a loss. And yes, more investors are always welcomed in the project! Are you interested? 🙂

Q: If you could go back and change one thing about the way you developed eRepublik, what would it be, and why?
As a business, knowing that this "crazy idea" would be as successful as eRepublik is now, I would have tried to recruit a bigger team from the start.

Q: Because inactive accounts take up to two months to die, some people estimate the real number of active users at only around 40,000-50000. Do you agree with this estimate, and if so, why is nothing being done to show a much more realistic number of total players?
Our definition of an active citizen is a living citizen who is not dead, nor banned. Regarding the estimation, I can tell you that in the last 3 days 50% of the number of active citizens logged in to eRepublik.com, and that's a constant value that has varied between 49% to 54% in the last months. However, this leaves out the citizens that don't log in so regularly or that are active only during elections or during wars.


Q: What is your most memorable in-game experience/event and why?
I want to take advantage of this opportunity in order to express my frustration created by the fact that I can't play eRepublik. I can only work and vote. I can't express by beliefs concerning different political leaders, I can't fight, I can't have a company and I can't be a politician. So unfortunately my in-game experience is quite limited.

Q: What is the most memorable behind-the-scenes event/experience?
There are plenty, but I don't know if I should make them public...but what the hell. One interesting case was when somebody bought a domain-name with my name in it and created a g*y p*rn website just for me as revenge for an in-game action that we did. So I found the guy's name and phone number, and called him to thank him for the effort. It was quite nice because I contacted him asking stuff about his professional experience and talking about this cool start up that I have and I would like to collaborate with him because the guy was very good in his professional life. Then I told him that I'm George from eRepublik. He put down the website and we are now friends (in a normal kind of way).

Something else that meant a lot to me: I believe you know about the tension between Romanians and Hungarians. This is something that some people experience in real life, too. And in the middle of the RO vs. HU war, the real life president of Hungary met with the real life president of Romania. This being something that had no connection with the team, I was really happy to see that people do consider eRepublik -and especially the war module- as just a game and that in real life we are friends.


Q: eRepublik has more than 20 staff members and had obtained more than $1,000,000 (US) in funding. You have the money and the talent, yet you have not added any significant features to the game since the launch of V1. You mentioned before that the team has focused mainly on optimization and bug-fixing, but it has now been almost 8 months and many people feel that this excuse is no longer acceptable. For the average user, nothing has improve the game in a very, very long time. Why is this, and will we ever see regular features additions?
I consider this a really valid issue and any point that I'll further make does not mean that we couldn't have done better. The first issue, and the most important one, is that we launched V1 faster than a normal product should be launched. It was a decision taken by the team and it had to be that way because Beta became impossible to keep online. So our goal was to put V1 online as fast as possible...that was done with a team of 3 developers. 3 developers that needed to build an economical simulator, a political simulator, a war module, a social network, a twitter-like solution, a forum, a flash app, a blog-like system and make them all work together - make sure that they are scalable and avoid exploits. All this in 4 months. The reason we only put 3 devs on the project was mainly because last year we were still a small team, and although we could have allocated more devs, the risk of running into financial issues would have increased too much.

So these last 8 months we mainly concentrated on bug fixing and optimization, but besides that we also implemented the advisor system (that helps a lot new citizens), latest events, ticketing system, moderator tools, new countries, reporting and administration tools and tons of small stuff. The idea is that in the end the most important modules in eRepublik will be very much improved and we will work on them one by one. We want to avoid a situation where we will have to publish modules before they are properly tested, just because the old modules can't run anymore (as in Beta). Lastly, we've already started to work on the new modules (concept + design) but they will not be live before we have Citizen ads and a Citizenship module ready.


Q: Back in the earlier days of the Beta, some people suggested the idea of selling eRepublik Gold for real money. Several online games like Second Life have embraced this openly, and had amazing success with it. What is your stance on this?
Currently we do not allow this. In the future we may change our stance on this, but only after a really thorough analysis. This involves serious legal problems among other things...and I'm thinking that in some countries this is actually flat out illegal. But we will definitely look into it - some companies do this so it might be a good idea for the future.


Q: Roughly speaking, what percentage of new signups per day come from non-avertisement sources, i.e. natural growth?
The vast majority of new sign-ups come from "word of mouth" and invitations. Currently we are not focusing so much on payed advertising, but as soon as we see eRepublik approaching it's maturity as a game, we will invest more in PR and payed advertising.

Q: eRepublik's stated goal was to become "the #1 online strategy game". Looking back at the last 2 years and a statistical game population of over 100,000 players, how far along are you, and what must you do to ultimately reach that goal?
The most important thing that we lack right now are improvements in the military, politics and economic modules. Making the product better is our number one priority. If you could just see the descriptions of the improvements you would agree that this goal is quite reachable.

The war module in particular will be our main focus. There we want to add more tactics and more ways to communicate with your comrades, because the communication will be crucial.


Q: Why in god's name does the company employees list still not show the wellness of each employee, forcing GMs to make 10-20 extra clicks to receive vital information?
This improvement, among with others, is part of the Company tools improvements that is planned to be done.

It sounds trivial, but things are not simple when you have 1.800 people online. Every small improvement must be analyzed beforehand, making sure that it doesn't break the site's scalability and then tested to check if everything is ok. That's the process that we usually go through. At this level of complexity, a software application is like an eco-system: adding one new life-form to it might affect the equilibrium of the whole.

These improvements are coming for sure after citizen ads, citizenship, newsletter and world map. They may be included in a bigger re-release of the economy module. I also want to point out that small stuff like this, if requested by the community and we realize it's importance, can be moved faster.

Q: The eRepublik API has been more or less ignored since its enthusiast Beta launch in February of this year. Many developers with high aspirations and great project ideas have lost hope and withered away. What do you think about this?
You have valid reasons to feel frustrated about the fact that the API development didn't advanced as we all expected. But I believe you, too, would prefer a later launch of the API rather than a premature launch on a broken website. Again, we do add feeds (maybe at a lower rate than expected) and new apps still appear and will continue to appear. In the close future we want to start focusing on the strategy to promote it and improve it.


Q: Player customization is arguably one of the most overlooked features in many browser-games and was part of your to-do list for the first half of 2009. We've seen nothing so far...can we expect anything in the near future?
About 2 months ago we conducted the Citizen's survey where one of the questions was what customization was considered the most important (party, company, country, citizen). The least requested was the citizen customization, but still, some improvements are planned for this.

Interview conducted in December,2010
Not original
Please V+S