Popularium launches alpha for Chaos Agents from Magic creator Richard Garfield
Chaos Agents, a new autobattler royale game from Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield, is launching its private alpha test today.
The game from the startup studio Popularium has had a lot of interest since its announcement at Gen Con 2024. More than 20,000 players have signed up for 1,000 seats in the alpha test. To meet the demand, Popularium will increase the number of alpha seats to 5,000 for the initial launch of the alpha, and it plans to expand the Alpha beyond 10,000 players in early 2025.
“We have been overwhelmed by the response to the Alpha announcement,” said Arka Ray, president and CTO at Popularium, in a statement. “The number of players who want to join the alpha and experience Richard’s vision has been over 20 times more than we anticipated. And we continue to get hundreds of new applications each week. We’re expecting more than 30 thousand applicants by year end. The team is working through the holidays to accommodate as many players as possible at this early stage of the Alpha. We want every applicant to have an opportunity to experience Chaos Agents as soon as possible.”
To prepare for this rapid expansion, Popularium launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on the Republic platform. The campaign was fully committed and then oversubscribed within six hours of launching publicly.
The Popularium campaign on Republic enables members of the public to invest in Popularium. Ray attributed the rapid close of the campaign to players and fans of Popularium cofounders Garfield and Jonathan Bankard (co-creator of Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Command and Conquer) wanting to directly support the development of their next original game.
“This is an exciting time for Chaos Agents,” said Garfield in a community Q&A on the occasion of launch of the Chaos Agents alpha and crowdfunding campaign on Republic. “The game is being really well received by players, much more so than I expected at this early stage. There are so many different types of play modes that we want to build into Chaos Agents, and thanks to the community and the technology we have built, it’s becoming clear what we can and should be building. There’s no more exciting time for a game’s development when players are clearly enjoying it, but at the same time the opportunities for improvements seem endless.”
Forever multiplayer game
The Alpha Launch follows the announcement that Popularium has committed to the “forever multiplayer game” model for Chaos Agents. Through the use of dedicated servers and its proprietary Chaos cloud gaming engine, Popularium plans to ensure that Chaos Agents will be a multiplayer game that “can’t be killed” or taken offline.
Players are expected to always have a way to play the game with the globally unique superheroes they have recruited to their team. Garfield and Ray attributed the positive response from this announcement as having helped generate additional interest in the Chaos Agents Alpha and crowdfunding campaign.
In Chaos Agents, the first game of the “autobattler-royale” genre, players coach and guide a globally unique superhero – their Chaos Agent – to victory in a grand battle royale against dozens of other Agents.
The player coaches and powers their hero up through deep, strategic card play similar to Garfield’s legendary games, such as Magic and Keyforge, and then sits back and watches as their agent goes to battle, preparing for the next round of upgrades. Each Agent is globally unique – which means that only one player in the world will be able to play with an Agent at a time and become the global expert on that agent.
“Evolving and creating new genres is just so much fun,” said Bankard, game director for Chaos Agents , in a statement. “All of us at Popularium have worked on projects like Magic and Hearthstone that started as small dreams that ended up impacting many more players than we initially hoped. We are trying something similar with Chaos Agents–to bring the autobattler genre of games to many more people through the proven format of battle royales. The advantage we now have is the early involvement of our community in helping us polish this uncut gem into a brilliant, shining diamond through their play and now investments that let them own a piece of Popularium.”
Chaos Agents plans to expand its alpha in late January together with the Second Chaos World Championship, and plans to expand the alpha capacity each month before entering Early Access in late 2025. Players can sign up for the alpha at popularium.com and request priority access by joining theChaos Agents Discord server.
