Paradox Interactive have announced that they will acquire Harebrained Schemes, the developers behind Shadowrun Returns and Battletech, at a cost of $7.5 million. They will become the sole shareholders of the company.
Harebrained Schemes recently completed Battletech for Paradox and presumably must have done quite well for the company, if they were willing to purchase the developers outright.
Harebrained Schemes was co-founded by Shadowrun and Battletech creator Jordan Weisman, who had this to say about the buyout:
"Mitch Gitelman 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 fuelled 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."
Mitch himself added, "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."
Harebrained Schemes will continue to manage themselves and their creative teams internally, and they will gain access to Paradox's "business and distribution expertise, financial support, and an extended colleague network of strategy enthusiasts".
Fredrik Wester, current CEO of Paradox Interactive, said, "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."
For more on Battletech, check out our review.
