The decline of eRepublik, an urban legend or an hard truth?

Day 4,793, 08:04 • Published in USA USA • by Mister Y

Hello everyone and happy new year again. After so long wait, I finally had the time to make the promised graphic about the whole eRepublik alive citizens with some explanations around the situation. This is my artwork (you can right click and see it bigger in another window):



You can see in the end of 2019 eRepublik counted around 46.000 alive citizens. Someone might perceive a slight decline in those months already, but it was totally meaningless.
From the middle of March, in fact, the population raised a lot and eRepublik gained 2500 new players (and players came back) in just a month. Everyone thinks that was due to the big lockdown caused by the first wave of coronavirus, and it was also the period, lasted six weeks, of the “Stay at home challenges”.

Anyway, the population dropped faster as it increased in the next months. I counted almost 1000 citizens less every month. These are the data:

1 May: 47.559
1 June: 45.947
1 July: 45.070
1 August: 44.288
1 September: 43.225
1 October: 42.054
1 November: 41.778

Well, not every loss is due to the people boredom: I can say in the beginning of September, for some strange reasons, admins of eRepublik finally wake up and decided to clean the game of fakes and multiaccounts. In just three days they banned around 850 multiaccounts, and they were all marked as “dead citizens” the month later, where you can see the big step in the graphic.
The population has finally stabilized around 42.000 players, and the “Resource Wars” event did not increased the number. At least it not even decreased.
The “Amazing Journey” event, instead, has pushed up the population a bit, in that week, but the positive trend was not maintained and, in December, the game has lost other 1000 players.

The graphic sure tells you the game is in a slow and fatal decline. A year ago I was pretty sure that eRepublik members would reached the 10 millions milestone before 2021. Instead, today this is one of the last registered players:
https://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/9610581
I.D. 9.610.581, it means the game still miss almost 390.000 players to ten millions registrations.
Even if eRepublik still counts 200-300 new registrations every day, they are less than the registrations of 2019.

All these data seem to support the hypothesis of the decline of eRepublik. But, on the other hand, someone can say my graphic is incorrect, because I putted the intercept on the axis at 38.000 players, just to emphasize the tip of the iceberg. This is pretty true, so I put also the graphic starting at zero:



After all, 4.000 people of 46.000 is not even 9 %. Looked in this way, the data seem not much worrying (and 850 of them were just toxic multiaccounts). Moreover, the game has demonstrated it can gain people activating some funny events, above all the Amazing Journey: in just a week it has increased the population of 500 players in both 2019 and 2020.

So yes, for us, the question is still open: the decline of eRepublik is an urban legend or an hard truth?
Everyone can tell his opinion, but just the future will say the right answer.
I wish to the game the best of luck, because I still like it. And for my readers, after all these useless cold numbers, it’s time to give something hot, finally: