Just a little while ago, Paradox Interactive have announced they are buying Harebrained Schemes. Harebrained Schemes just released the incredible robot-battling strategy title, BATTLETECH. You can check our review for the game out here. The company also released Shadowrun Returns.
The deal isn’t totally finalized yet, but should be formal in the very near future. Once the deal is done, Harebrained will act as an internal division within Paradox, but will retain its structure and leadership within that framework.
Paradox Interactive CEO Fredrik Wester accompanied the announcement with a statement, teasing what publisher and developer can do together in the long term:
“Harebrained Schemes have proven themselves as a world-class studio with a very talented team within a genre where Paradox wants to be present. In addition, we really like the studio, the people who run it, and their games; these are all absolute hard criteria for us in any acquisition. Our recent successful launch of BATTLETECH, our first project together, has been a fantastic collaboration, but the possibilities of what we can do together in the long term now that we’ve joined forces — that’s what has us truly excited.”
Harebrained Schemes CEO Jordan Weisman quickly added his own words, citing the expertise and financial support from Paradox as vital to the continued success of his studio.
“Mitch and I started Harebrained to create the kind of story-rich tactical games we loved and for the last seven years, our studio has been fueled by our team’s passion and by the generous support of our fans. As the scale of our games has grown and the marketplace has gotten extremely noisy we felt that HBS needed to team up with a company that could provide us the financial stability and marketing expertise that would allow us focus on what we love doing – making great games and stories.”
Harebrained Schemes President Mitch Gitelman also commented, echoing a similar tone to Weisman.
“Our experience working with Paradox on BATTLETECH was the best of our careers and proved to us that this was a company we would be proud to be a part of. What’s more, we’ve gotten to experience the incredible audience that Paradox has firsthand: the fans who we met at PDXCON in May after having launched our game were so full of enthusiasm and appreciation. We share a deep respect for our audiences, for healthy and collaborative teams, and for the creative process itself — the fit just works”
As a bit of a victory lap, Paradox is giving away copies of Stellaris to anyone who backed BATTLETECH. Details on how to claim that free game will be released soon. Also, there’s apparently some new DLC in the works for BATTLETECH, so keep on the lookout for that too.
