eRepublik.com where we really are...

Day 3,049, 05:03 • Published in France France • by alexis bonte

I recently posted a story on my blog entitled "The end of the mobile game gold rush, RIP Tactical Heroes". As a result of this story a few articles were published in game, and some like this one by Gnilraps got a high level of comments and debate from several great and respected eRepublik players.

I also got a few direct messages from some of the players such as Jaroslav Kolesnik who read the article. After answering one from Antonio Wimer that he published here, I realized that you all deserved a more personal, complete and direct reply from me.

This is why I am restarting my personal eRepublik.com newspaper, "eRepublik.com Inside News" for this article. And yes, it's been over 2000 days since the last time I used it. That is simply because it´s not the most efficient way of communicating with you but it is the most personal one (other than replying to each individual email or comment) so that is why I'm using it now.

Beside the Gnilraps article which is well written, there are also a lot of very good comments in this article and others that mention it. They just show how exceptional and intelligent the eRepublik.com community is and that is something we really care about.

We have a community of players that understand are have significant understanding of what keeping eRepublik.com running for 8 years means. One of the players for example mentions how it’s important for us to give developers the possibility to work on different games (something that gives them fresh ideas and keeps them engaged, learning new technologies that eRepublik.com can benefit from). Others mention the importance as a company not to put all your eggs in just one basket. All of these are correct and sensible points.

You also know we could have done much better and you are right and that is our aim, to do a better job for you, for eRepublik.com

So first of all, eRepublik is not dead, although I understand that makes for a great headline - it is a claim that is very far from the truth. The team and I have every intention to make all effort possible to see eRepublik.com thrive, simply because we all still love its underlining concept and we still believe we haven't been able to take it to its full potential. Far from it.

I’d like to point out to everyone one important fact that I mentioned in my post but that was left out in Gnilraps’ article. Yes, we failed with Tactical Heroes but we succeeded with Age of Lords. So now we are in a situation as a company where we have 2 successful games instead of one. We have learned how to be successful in mobile as well as browser.

This is extremely important not just for the future of the company as a whole but to that of eRepublik.com itself. If you look at our first attempt at doing a mobile version of Erepublik.com the least we can say is that it was not a successful one. Now we know what it takes to have success on mobile.


Why should you care as an eRepublik.com player that Age of Lords is successful? Well, simply because that means that we now have more resources that we can re-invest back into new games and into our big brand, back into eRepublik.com. The point I tried to make in my post, perhaps not clearly enough, is that we were able to find success with Age of Lords in part because of all we learned first with eRepublik.com but also because of failures such as Tactical Heroes. These learnings will now revert to eRepublik.com

Would we have had more benefits and made eRepublik.com better if instead we had focused only on Erepublik.com? I honestly do not think so simply because that is what we did for 6 years and historically we have made many mistakes with eRepublik.com. Remember Rising? The time we actually had the most resources exclusively dedicated to eRepublik.com was during Rising in 2010 and again in 2013 and that is when we started declining.


Still an important thing that I really want to make clear is that at no time during the past years when we opened development on other games did we stop maintaining and investing in eRepublik.com.

We may have been conservative in the updates we bring to the game but that is simply because as we all know, it’s a very delicate and unique game with a difficult balance and big changes are risky and could break the balance (as it’s happened before). So when eRepublik.com is your only game it is difficult to take risks.

Right now eRepublik.com's main flaw is that it doesn't keep enough of its new players, we all know that. To actually measure it and understand it better, we have been advertising online to get new players in the game over the past few months. One of the really positive things we have learned is that many players out there love the concept, they want to play eRepublik.com our adverts have had incredible results in terms of getting players to try the game, we are just not retaining them. This shows us that the brand and the concept of eRepublik.com still have tremendous potential, we are just not offering the right experience to new users. So that is one clear direction we need to work on. We have tried and failed before, but now we have experience in how to match successfully a new player expectations so we have a higher chance of getting it right this time. One key thing we learned is that the best improvements for new players when done in the right way are also embraced by the older players.

So now that we have learned both from our failures and our successes we are in a much better position to make improvements to eRepublik.com that will have a positive impact on the quality of the game for both new and old players. Yes we will give everything we got so that eRepublik.com and its community not only celebrate 10 years but also start growing again.

We see a future for eRepublik.com the browser game but also the concept and the brand and it is at the center of our strategy to grow it. We think that if as a company we are able to run 3 or 4 successful games rather than just one, then all the games will benefit from that. That is our objective for the next 18 months, to go from 2 successful games to 3 or 4 and most importantly all of them growing, with a focus on eRepublik.com

How are we going to achieve that for eRepublik.com? By giving it more resources again, applying all that we have learned and taking more risks. Does that mean that you are going to see radical changes right away? Not necessarily. Although we all have a different definition of radical, you are going to see key changes in the next few weeks and months. They will be radical in time but not initially as we will deploy them progressively so that we can test them not only from your feedback but also from how they are used and the impact they have on the balance of the game and engagement of new users.

One key thing that is important to mention. The top priority for eRepublik.com at this stage is not to maximize revenues. The top priority for the eRepublik.com team is to find ways to make the community grow again and that will be the direction and objective for all our work.


Thank you again for being part of this community and for caring. I hope the above mentioned points answer at least in part some of your questions and go some way in explaining and demonstrating that as a company we are all very much devoted to not only continuing to maintain eRepublik.com but growing it as well.

o7

Alexis