On the 28th of December 2009, the 1 millionth eRepublik citizen was created a little over one year after the launch of the public version of eRepublik. This was a great moment for us and also for me personally as many in the industry (that I won’t name) told us that eRepublik would never interest more than a few thousand people. I was even told that 250.000 players was the absolute maximum we could hope to reach for this type of game. Well not only we have more than 1 million registered users (all banned accounts have been excluded from this total), 320.000 play regularly and over 50% of those every day. So thanks to the doubters for encouraging us to prove you wrong :). This is especially encouraging as eRepublik is still a work in progress we have only about 30% of the core game finished and this doesn’t include many other things we have planned for and around it.

This has all been achieved thanks to the hard work of our team (now 45 people) and the feedback and enthusiasm of our incredibly passionate and smart community of players and I thank them again. We know that the eRepublik experience is still far from perfect today and although we do everything in our power to make it better that is the cost of innovation, of learning and of taking on such an ambitious concept. What I can promise is that we will continue to constantly improve it.

To close off 2009 and start 2010 on another positive note we have also learned that eRepublik was selected by AlwaysOn as an OnMedia top 100 Winner, a selection of the hottest emerging private companies in the digital field.

To celebrate this you can find below a few video comments in “Guido’s fake eRepublik interview”. In case you are wondering, yes its totally amateurish uncut and first shot in the tradition of other such eRepublik team videos such as the (beta launch), 786 days ago when we had about 300 players waiting to go online. Oh and in this new video I’m watching in my computer how my home country France is actually disappearing from the map and at the same time trying to look trough my notes what it is I’m supposed to say. Our PR people say its time for some media training so perhaps the reaction from the french president might show how these things must be done: Sarkozy in France vs Spain.