eRepublik Brings CartoDB’s Dynamic Mapping to Online Gaming

For years we at CartoDB have been dedicated to visualizing geospecific data to gain analytic insight and tell compelling stories. Our real-time rendering and time-lapse technologies have helped illustrate phenomena all over the earth from Barcelona traffic to Kenyan elephant movements to the history of meteorite strikes on the planet. Now for the first time CartoDB’s power of dynamic mapping is also enhancing a virtual world with massively multiplayer online game eRepublik.

eRepublik is a popular free-to-play strategy game with hundreds of thousands of users globally. Players in eRepublik’s New World claim allegiance to a specific country, for which they build companies, develop diplomatic strategies, and fight on battlefields for more territory. While maps are an especially apt visualization for this kind of gaming application, eRepublik had a hard time to provide them for so many players with any useful accuracy. The game’s very popularity and the volume of rapidly changing content posed the greatest obstacle to successful mapping. CartoDB, however, gives eRepublik a means of producing accurate maps for their many users for a fraction of the cost charged by other SaaS mapping companies.

CartoDB, unlike other mapping platforms, is in fact designed to handle dynamic content at large scales efficiently. With our API eRepublik no longer needs to generate new maps after each player’s action. Instead, as the game progresses eRepublik simply modifies the map data, and the platform renders the changes automatically. Map content gets updated at least once every twenty minutes and players are able to see a visual representation of the game’s current state with practically real-time accuracy. CartoDB handles approximately two million map views in eRepublik daily.

We’re pleased at CartoDB to share this use of our platform by eRepublik both because we’re proud of how it showcases our exceptional dynamic rendering and scaling capabilities, and because for us it’s new territory. Games like eRepublik demonstrate that not every community organizes around real space, and geospatial data is not the only kind that produces interesting map stories.

Let us know if you have more ideas for alternative-space uses of CartoDB, and as always, don’t be shy about sharing your own map stories!