Interview - eRepublik CEO Alexis Bonte

Posted by Chris Evans on 10.18.2008

411's Chris Evans talks to the CEO of eRepublik, Alexis Bonte.

eRepublik is a web based game in a similar vein to NationStates and Ogame in that you log on to the website and run everything from there. eRepublik is a game targeted a strategy gamers who are looking for something they can play for just fifteen minutes a day if they need to. The world of eRepublik is largely user run and this is a world that still hasn't had the full public launch. I recently had the chance to pose some questions to the CEO of eRepublik, Alexis Bonte, read on to see what he had to say about the game.

Chris - eRepublik is being targeted at a casual MMO audience, how have you gone about making a game that will appeal to both casual and MMO gamers?

Alexis - Actually we are targeting adult strategy gamers that no longer have the time to play games such as civilization or sim city but want to find an online game that gives them the same depth of game-play with a smaller time investment. So we made sure that eRepublik had the sort of things that made the strategy games of old great as well as leveraged the potential of the web for human interaction and user content creation and that it could be played in 15 minutes per day over several months rather than many hours over a few days.

Chris - How have you managed to make a game work where users only have to play for quarter of an hour a day to? Is it worth players putting more time into eRepublik?

Alexis - We designed in such a way that a erepublik citizen wetter he runs a company, is a congressman, a journalist, a soldier or a mix of various things can do all his basic tasks and progress in the world of eRepublik in under 15 minutes. Still it doesn't mean you can't get more involved and put more time into it. It can be worth it for certain eRepublik users to do so depending on the sort of career they want to pursue. What tends to happen is citizens have a cyclical behaviour where on certain days they will just do the strict minimum (work, buy food for their citizen) and on other days spend more time.

Chris - The game has been compared to titles such as Risk and Civilisation, do you think these are fair comparisons to make?

Alexis - Risk and Civilisation were definitely an inspiration for us. Of course eRepublik is a new kind of game, replacing artificial intelligence with human interaction thanks to social tools gives it a completely different gameplay to classical titles. Thanks to this eRepublik is a lot less linear and only limited by a person's imagination. Also, being browser based it can be played anywhere and on any device and since 90% of its content is created by its users and we constantly make small improvements to it based on users feedback, eRepublik is constantly evolving and the game now is very different from what it a few months ago. It's a work in constant progress. It will be even more so when we launch our API with the first user built eRepublik modules in a few months.

Chris - You are putting a lot of trust in the players to create a lot of the in-game infrastructure, aren't you scared that something will go wrong and cause the in game economy to collapse?

Alexis - Actually no, part of the excitement of eRepublik for us is that we don't control everything. The fact that its based on a country systems means that usually it self balances and when one country is not doing well others are doing well. Its cyclical. Also given that we are based on a accelerated reality where 1 month in eRepublik is like 4 years in the real world, there are elections every month and an incompetent government never stays in power very long so things can be turned around quickly.

Chris - There is a great focus on the stories that emerge from the game, what are some of your favourites?

Alexis - "Dio Brando" managing to declare himself god emperor of Pakistan and have about 600 people regularly voting for him to keep things that way is quite interesting.

Another favourite for me is Spains very peaceful approach to the game, whilst most countries have been quite aggressive and declared war on their neighbours easily, Spain has really concentrated on building its economy and infrastructure.

Iran opening an embassy in the USA and the dialogue that created between Iranian citizens and Americans was also something nice to see.

Also spontaneous offline gatherings all over the world of people that have become friends in eRepublik is great, in particular when they happen in places as far away as Indonesia or Brasil (where we have large communities)

Finally tales of corruption and seeing journalists outing them and citizens becoming investigators are always entertaining.

Chris - The economic system in the game seems like it may be a bit daunting for any new players, give us a run down on how it works.

Its correct that we have an apparently very complex economical system in Erepublik but in the end it is really a simplified version of the world economy when all currencies had their value set on gold reserves.

In Erepublik all countries have a local currency, when a citizen has a job he gets paid in local currency. The things he produces are sold by the company again in local currency so we have a full virtual goods economy that is managed by the users that runs on local currencies. There are then markets where goods can be sold, demand varies according to world events it's all very close to reality in fact.


Chris - You say that over 90% of the game content is user created, how have you managed to do that?

Alexis - Its quite simple actually we just provided our users with a basic environment and the tools to let them express their creativity and to communicate with each other. It's the beginning of a new world where they have clear goals and challenges as well as not so clear ones that they can make up themselves. You can think of it like a book where we have only written the first page and you find the story compelling enough that you want to fill in the blank pages yourself with the pen we gave you, and the great thing is that when you have writers block you can just lay back a little and watch others write if for you until you are ready to jump back in.

Chris - How do you feel knowing the public launch is just a few weeks away?

Alexis - Happy and scared :o) This is just the first step of many more and we still have a long way to go before we make eRepublik what it can be and what its citizens want it to be.

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