Chaos is Coming

Popularium was founded by a team assembled from across the wide spectrum of the gaming world. Previously, we honed our skills on some of the best, most beloved gaming franchises in history—games like Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, and Halo. Now, we’ve combined our broad range of experiences to create exciting, new, next-level gaming experiences for players, creators, and spectators alike.

And the Popularium team is comprised of more than just its core members. Equally as important in the development of our gaming ventures are you, our gaming community. Even in the earliest stages of their development, we will provide you with the means to impact both the gameplay and the asset-creation in all of our games. Our aim is that all of our games be as fun to watch as they are to play. Ongoing community involvement is a key step in ensuring we can deliver on that promise.

Beginning with Chaos Engine, our games will distill Popularium’s core values, our experiences, and our creativity into delivering gameplay full of unique world-building and character development, fun, meaningful gaming experiences and active community engagement. In short, we’re making the kinds of games we’ve always wanted to play.

New Game, New Platform

Chaos Engine, our first game, pits five powerful alien races against one another in a frenzied quest to harvest powerful and unpredictable energy shards that can imbue the possessors with extraordinary abilities.

Chaos Engine, like all of our games, is being built on the Popularium Platform, the first gaming platform that lets players own and trade digital game assets across titles without requiring cryptocurrencies.

Chaos Engine Simulator - coming soon

The Chaos Engine Simulator will be rolling out throughout 2023. Sign up here to join our gamer-dev community and play along!

Popularium Stories

Popularium is comprised of dreamers from across the gaming, entertainment, and tech worlds—all of whom are passionate about gaming and storytelling in all their forms.

Our love of games is about more than the engaging, momentary entertainment they can offer. We also appreciate gameplay for offering rich, valuable experiences that transport us to fantastic new worlds.

Just as well-developed game worlds provide stories that help us make sense of the seeming chaos of the real world, we in turn want to offer story-driven games that help others create meaningful experiences of their own.

As a way to introduce ourselves and our community, we’re happy to share some of our stories that dive into our collective love of gaming, and reveal the motivations behind the games and experiences we are building at Popularium.

If you enjoy these stories, you can find more contributions from our community at stories.popularium.com.

My Nights In The Old Republic

I plop down on the carpet as the familiar Star Wars opening crawl takes over the TV screen, filling me in on events that occurred a long, long time ago. 4000 years before Episode I. Whoa. That was unexpected. That must be the “old” in Old Republic.

Read 7min

Geeking Out

I’ve been hiding for my entire life, but that’s about to end.

Read 5min

Life is Strange

I’m a 31-year-old man on my third glass of whiskey, and a game where you play as a high-school girl is bringing me to tears.

Read 3min

Lydion Magazine: The World is a Playground

Gaming is the fastest growing sector of the entertainment industry, with revenue projected to hit $300B by the end of 2022. Rapid expansion is wresting power from the hands of studios, who once had unlimited control over which games to produce, build, and distribute.

Now the world is our playground. Gamers have the tools, time, and network access to play—and build—games their way. Streaming platforms have become global hubs of community, uniting—and activating—legions of audiences. Studios are fighting this accessibility and democratization, creating confusion and division that drives away their consumer base. We think this is a mistake: gaming’s future lies in gamer empowerment.

The World is a Playground

From The Lydion Magazine comes The World is a Playground; a five-part series on gaming. Each edition focuses on a unique emerging territory–the rise of streaming platforms, the role of community, gamification, and digital assets–on the shifting landscape of the gaming industry.

Part 1: Games as Storytelling Engines

In Part 1, Popularium team members Jon Bankard, Jen Yi, Chris Ryall, Arka Ray, and others explore the evolution of games into engines for the creation of stories driven by gamers, who in turn are turning into content creators with the advent of streaming.

Part 2: All for One and One for All

In Part 2, gaming industry veterans such as David Hoppe (Gen Con), Dave Nemetz (Inverse, Bleacher Report) and rising stars such as Jyro Blade and Kore Bundt dive deep into the growing role and importance of gaming communities in the development process of games and the changing relationship between developers and their communities through evolving release models such as Early Access.