Paradox Interactive is set to acquire BattleTech and Shadowrun developer Harebrained Schemes, according to an announcement by the Swedish video game publisher. The deal with see Paradox acquiring 100% of the shares of Harebrained Schemes for $7.5 million as well as a portion of the studio’s earnings for the next five years. Paradox first worked with Harebrain to publish BattleTech this year.
Paradox Interactive CEO Fredrik Wester said in a statement:
“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.”
Paradox Interactive has previously published other strategy games such as the Stellaris and Europa Universalis franchises. The company also published the first Pillars of Eternity and its expansions. On the other hand, Harebrained Schemes is known for the Shadowrun series, which was one of the earliest successful video game Kickstarter campaigns. BattleTech was also another successful Kickstarter campaign for the studio.
In a statement on the acquisition CEO of Harebrained Schemes Jordan Weisman commented: “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.”
As a division of Paradox Interactive, Harebrained Schemes will continue to run with its own internal management and creative teams, with the Paradox acquisition giving the studio access to the publisher’s resources.
