Agents of Chaosa new Autobattler Royale game from Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield launches its private alpha test today.
The startup studio game Popularity has generated a lot of interest since its announcement at Gen Con 2024. Over 20,000 players registered for 1,000 seats in the alpha test. To meet demand, Popularium will increase the number of alpha seats to 5,000 for the initial alpha launch, and plans to expand the Alpha beyond 10,000 players in early 2025.
“We have been overwhelmed by the response to Alpha’s 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 was more than 20 times greater than we anticipated. 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 at this early stage of the Alpha. We want every candidate to have the opportunity to experience Agents of Chaos as soon as possible.
To prepare for this rapid expansion, Popularium launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on the Republic platform. The campaign was fully engaged and then oversubscribed within six hours of its public launch.
The Popularium campaign on Republic allows members of the public to invest in Popularium. Ray attributed the campaign’s quick close to players and fans of Popularium co-founders 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.
“It’s an exciting time for Chaos Agents,” Garfield said during a community Q&A to mark the launch of the Chaos Agents alpha and crowdfunding campaign on Republic. “The game is very well received by players, much more than I expected at this early stage. There are so many different types of game modes we want to incorporate into Chaos Agents, and through the community and technology we’ve built, it’s becoming clear what we can and should build. There’s no more exciting time for game development when players are clearly enjoying it, but at the same time the possibilities for improvement seem endless.
Eternal multiplayer game
The Alpha’s launch follows the announcement that Popularium has committed to the “always-on multiplayer game” model for Chaos Agents. Through the use of dedicated servers and its proprietary Chaos cloud game engine, Popularium plans to ensure that Chaos Agents will be a multiplayer game that “cannot be killed” or taken offline.
Players should still have a way to play the game with the unique superheroes in the world that they have recruited into their team. Garfield and Ray credited the positive response to this announcement as helping to generate additional interest in the Chaos Agents Alpha and crowdfunding campaign.
In Chaos Agents, the first game in the autobattler-royale genre, players train and guide a unique superhero in the world – their Agent of Chaos – to victory in a grand battle royale against dozens of other Agents.
The player trains and strengthens their hero through an in-depth, strategic card game similar to legendary Garfield games such as Magic and Keyforge, then sits back and watches their agent go into battle, preparing for the next round of upgrades . Each agent is unique in the world, which means that only one player in the world will be able to play with one agent at a time and become the world expert on that agent.
“Evolving and creating new genres is so much fun,” Bankard, game director for Chaos Agents, said in a statement. “At Popularium, we’ve all worked on projects like Magic and Hearthstone that started as small dreams and ended up impacting many more players than we initially hoped. We’re trying something similar with Chaos Agents: to bring the Autobattler game genre to more people through the proven Battle Royale format. The advantage we have now is the early involvement of our community to help us turn this gem in the rough into a bright, shining diamond through their gameplay and now investments that allow them to own a piece of Popularium.
Chaos Agents plans to expand its alpha in late January in conjunction with the Second Chaos World Championship, and plans to expand alpha capacity each month before entering Early Access in late 2025. Players can register for the ‘alpha on popularium.com and request priority access. by joining the
Agents of Chaos Discord Server.
