Chaos Agents, designed by Richard Garfield and the world's first autobattler-royale, sees rapid growth from playtest

News provided by

Mar 21, 2024, 06:30 ET

Developed by Popularium, the game's public Alpha will launch in summer 2024

LOS ANGELES, March 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Chaos Agents is the world's first autobattler-royale, designed by Richard Garfield and the first game developed by Popularium, co-founded by Garfield in 2022.

Chaos Agents blends the large-scale battle royale with the rapidly growing genre of auto-battlers, made popular by Auto-Chess, Hearthstone Battlegrounds, and the super-hit Vampire Survivors. In Chaos Agents, 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.

"With Chaos Agents, we were inventing the 'autobattler-royale' genre and didn't have a real-world example to learn from or improve upon. To find out if this new genre of game might work, we released an early prototype of Chaos Agents to a small community in October 2023. To our delight, it was clear right away that the simple mechanics of the prototype were leading to fun, engaging gameplay," said Garfield. "Over 70% of people who play Chaos Agents just once come back to play at least once a week. That's remarkable for any game, but especially one that's still at a pre-Alpha stage."

"Over 6 months of the playtest, 88% of players play a second match as soon as they finish the first, and over 60% end up playing 3 or more matches per session," said Jon Bankard, GM at Popularium and the Game Director for Chaos Agents. "It's a testament to Richard's vision, and to the quality and passion of our early community, that we have 'found the fun' in this completely new genre of game so quickly. We are now chipping away at this big block of marble, making the game more and more fun by adding and tuning features as we prepare for the public Alpha launch."

"We were looking for just a few hundred playtesters at this early stage of development to play the game and give us feedback, under NDA," said Arka Ray, co-founder and President of Popularium. "We currently have over 20K applicants waiting to join the playtest, which is about 20 times more than our playtest capacity. This is a great problem to have for an indie studio like ours, as we already have enough players signed up to launch a public Alpha!"

The response from the early Chaos Agents community has also helped accelerate the development of Chaos Agents significantly.

"It's like having an army of knowledgeable gamers, developers and testers helping us build this game with daily feedback," said Ray. "From our experience at building AAA games at large companies, we estimate that the community's participation has helped us reduce development time by over 50% compared to the average AAA game and helped us get to a public Alpha much faster than we originally planned."

Chaos Agents will be transitioning from an NDA-only Playtest to a broader public Alpha in Summer 2024, with launch details to be announced in April 2024.

Players can sign up for the Alpha at popularium.com.

About Popularium: Popularium was founded by an all-star team of gaming industry veterans responsible for the largest asset-based games and platforms in history, such as Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, and Xbox Live, to innovate and create gaming experiences. Popularium started from a simple idea that we shared: What would games look like if they involved the community from an early stage? What if this community had the tools to impact the narrative and create assets of real value through pure gameplay and interaction? Chaos Agents, designed by Popularium co-founder Richard Garfield, is Popularium's first effort to bring this vision to life.

Media Contact: Megan Duero, [email protected]

SOURCE Popularium