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Chaos agentsa new autobattler royale game from Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield, begins its private alpha test today.
The game from the startup studio Popular has received a lot of interest since its announcement at Gen Con 2024. More than 20,000 players have signed up for 1,000 spots in the alpha test. To meet demand, Popularium will increase the number of alpha slots to 5,000 at the initial launch of the alpha and plans to expand the alpha to over 10,000 players in early 2025.
“We were overwhelmed by the response to the alpha announcement,” Arka Ray, president and CTO of Popularium, said in a statement. “The number of players wanting to join the Alpha and experience Richard’s vision is over 20 times higher than we expected. And we continue to receive hundreds of new applications every week. We expect more than 30,000 applicants by the end of the year. The team is working over the holidays to accommodate as many players as possible in this early phase of Alpha. We want every applicant to have the opportunity to get to know Chaos Agents as quickly 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 its public launch.
The Popularium campaign on Republic allows the public to invest in Popularium. Ray attributed the campaign’s quick completion to players and fans of Popularium co-founders Garfield and Jonathan Bankard (co-creators 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,” Garfield said in a community Q&A session marking the launch of Chaos Agents’ alpha and crowdfunding campaign on Republic. “The game has been really well received by players, much more than I expected at this early stage. There are so many different types of game modes that we want to include in Chaos Agents, and thanks to the community and technology we’ve developed, it’s clear what we can and should develop. There is no more exciting time to develop a game when players are clearly enjoying it, but at the same time the possibilities for improvement seem endless.”
Forever multiplayer game
The alpha launch follows the announcement that Popularium has chosen the “Forever Multiplayer Game” model for Chaos Agents. By using dedicated servers and its proprietary Chaos Cloud gaming engine, Popularium aims to ensure that Chaos Agents is a multiplayer game that cannot be killed or taken offline.
Players are expected to always have the opportunity to play the game with the world’s unique superheroes that they have recruited to their team. Garfield and Ray attributed the positive response to this announcement to helping generate additional interest in the Chaos Agents Alpha and crowdfunding campaign.
In Chaos Agents, the first game in the “autobattler royale” genre, players coach and guide a world’s only superhero – their Chaos Agent – to victory in a major battle royale against dozens of other agents.
The player coaches and empowers their hero through deep, strategic card play reminiscent of Garfield’s legendary games like Magic and Keyforge, then sits back and watches as their agent goes into battle and prepares for the next round of upgrades. Each agent is globally unique – meaning only one player in the world can play with an agent at a time and become a global expert on that agent.
“It’s just so much fun to evolve and create new genres,” Bankard, game director for Chaos Agents, said in a statement. “All of us at Popularium have worked on projects like Magic and Hearthstone, which started as small dreams and ended up impacting many more players than we originally hoped. With Chaos Agents we’re trying to do something similar – to make the autobattler game genre accessible to many more people through the tried and tested format of battle royales. The advantage we have now is the early involvement of our community, helping us polish this rough gem into a brilliant, shining diamond through their play and now through investments that give them a piece of popularity.”
Chaos Agents plans to expand its alpha in late January alongside the Second Chaos World Championship and plans to expand 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
Chaos Agents Discord Server.
