eRepublik Localizes For Turkey, Greece, Eastern Europe

By On March 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Today eRepublik announced that it would bring its social strategy game to players in Turkey, Greece, and Eastern Europe with a series of new localizations. The game has previously been available to players in these territories, but only in its original English. Now players throughout these regions can play eRepublik in Turkish, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Croatian. eRepublik is also available to players in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Polish.

"There will be more languages added over the coming months so that eRepublik is fully accessible to any player from any corner of the world," said George Lemnaru, co-founder and COO of eRepublik, in a press statement. "We are making sure that when we release the new economic and military modules later this year, our players will be able to fully enjoy them from the beginning."

As of this writing, eRepublik serves about one million registered users, but offering a localized product could make a big difference when it comes to future growth. Especially for text-based RPGs like eRepublik, international users are more likely to start playing if they can read it in their native language. eRepublik monetizes primarily through sales of virtual currency, so international users are valuable as long as they have some way of paying for goods.

Turkey can be an unusually lucrative market for freemium gaming, with users funneling so much money into K2 Network's Knight Online that the Turkish government wished to tax it. To this day, the game supports Turkish-language forums and the Ultimate Game Card, which is available in Turkey. Eastern Europe can also be a lucrative area for social games when a game can get payment access, most often provided by the mobile pay service Fortumo.