Of course, it’s not just any game now that eRepublik, the web based social strategy game, boasts 1.8 million registered users. The game is essentially a browser-based virtual world where users can take on professions, start companies, run political parties, govern countries, foster alliances or declare war. Today eRepublik launches a major new release, eRepublik Rising, that’s just entered public beta. The new generation of the game is a complete makeover not just in terms of the visual interface which goes from flat to a much more graphic rich backdrop, but also in the strategy eRepublik has taken.

According to Bonte, the company polled over 14,000 players, studied behavior, online forums and constant flow of feedback to come up with the new version. Rising allows users to decide exactly how the game will evolve. The platform becomes the players’ playground, where they influence, create and make the wheels turn.  One of the features that thousand were asking for is more focus on military action. This new version allows up to 90,000 simultaneous players to fight in user initiated battles for enemy territories with machinery and weapons produced by other users. Rising has also introduced more professions for users to chose from. On the economic front, because this is a strategy game, users who are running companies can decide on products that they want to sell, based on supply and demand.

Essentially, with Rising, eRepublik wants to take social strategy gaming further, providing new tools and power to chose to it’s users against a more colorful backdrop.

Bonte also admits that another key change has been right at the start at the game, where they were losing a stunning 50% of thousands of daily signups. They’ve slimmed down the process, based on their analysis of massively successful Facebook based games, “there is a lot browser games can learn from Facebook games and vice – versa,” says Bonte.

eRepublik closed a $2 million Series A round last year and has experienced exponential growth, growing from 138.000 visits in November 2010 to 120 million total last May.

Rowland’s many achievements include co-founding King.com, which he took from startup to be a major player in the casual gaming space. And while VP of Marketing at uDate.com, he helped grow the online dating site to be number two in the US and UK. In December 2002, uDate.com acquired by IAC for $150 million. His latest venture is maths game site Mangahigh.com, where he also serves as CEO.

Therefore, having Rowland join the board of eRepublik seems quite a coup.

eRepublik Labs was founded in 2007 and is backed to the tune of €2,750,000 from AGF Private Equity in addition to various angels.

The startup’s first product is eRepublik, a massive online social strategy game which mirrors the real world. Players (called citizens) can participate in politics, set economic policy, start businesses, engage in wars with other countries and interact with each other along the way.

A year after the site’s public launch, eRepublik boasts one million registered users, of which 350,000 are deemed ‘active’ with 50% logging in everyday. In December 2009 the browser-based game saw 8.6 million visits and 206 million page views.

eRepublik, its first MOSS, is set in a browser-based mirrored version of the real world in which players (called citizens) can participate in politics, set economic policy, start businesses, engage in wars with other countries and interact socially with other players while they’re at it. The company pitches the virtual world to have an edge over other strategy games played online because it’s not nearly as time-consuming; 15 minutes per day they say should suffice.

According to the company, traffic numbers are going through the roof: the eRepublik website is said to have received over 3.7 million visits in May, with citizens from some 200 countries having spent over 55 million minutes and generating 95 million page views navigating the virtual world during that month. Pretty impressive for a small European company (eRepublik Labs only has 30 employees).

The fresh funding will be used to extend eRepublik in terms of new features: eRepublik co-founder and CEO Alexis Bonte says they’re only at about 25% of what the game should become in the near future. The company is also expanding the eRepublik platform into other languages – the company just launched a Spanish language version this month – and is busy preparing the launch of multiple new games.

Here’s a video of Bonte interviewing Guillaume Latour, a partner at AGF PE who will be joining the startup’s board:

It’s Elevator Pitch Friday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from eRepublik, a Spanish startup that wants to take strategy games and make them more social, more interactive, and therefore, more fun.

eRepublik wants to change the way that strategy games are played by taking out the hours of game play. Anyone who has played Risk or Diplomacy knows how long traditional strategy games can take. eRupublik has built an online virtual geo-political simulator that allows the player to “make history” in its virtual world with as little as fifteen minutes of daily game play. And, it is both free and completely browser based, two things that most strategy games are not.

It plans to make money from by selling the virtual currency used in the game. eRepublik is currently in private beta, and has raised one million dollars.

Madrid, Spain based startup Erepublik is aiming to make its mark in the online gaming community with a model that combines MMOG and social network.

At its core, Erepublik is a massive online multiplayer social strategy that aims to be intricate and accelerated enough “to attract a spectrum of both fanatical and casual gamers.” Players can be politicians, soldiers, entrepreneurs or journalists in different countries, and much of the environment is user generated. The game is still in invite only beta testing, but has 10,000 beta testers from 43 countries currently playing the game. A key pitch of Erupblik is the time required to play the game: 14 minutes a day.

Erepublik’s business model is based on a mixture of the sale of virtual goods, and advertising.

Erepublik has taken €200,000 in angel funding to date and is in the process of closing a further €550,000 round. Management includes CEO Alexis Bonte from lastminute.com and CTO George Lemnaru from Tevin Solutions.

It wont appeal to hard core gamers but that’s not the target market; a time poor MySpace/ Facebook generation who prefers their gaming less full on seems to be the target. It will be interesting to see how it grows in the coming year once it fully opens to the public.