Harebrained Schemes, the studio behind the recent Battletech and the three modern Shadowrun games, is set to be acquired by Paradox Interactive. Once the purchase goes through, Harebrained Schemes will act as an internal studio and will be responsible for its own management and creative teams, which also includes the ability to choose which games it's going to work on.
“Mitch and I started Harebrained to create the kind of story-rich tactical games we loved,” said Jordan Weisman, CEO of Harebrained Schemes, “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.”
"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 small token of appreciation, everyone that backed Battletech on Kickstarter will be getting a free copy of Stellaris. The exact details behind this arrangement will be revealed soon, but I'd still recommend keeping an eye on your email's spam folder, just in case.
Make sure to check out the latest expansion if you decide to pick up Stellaris
If you're wondering about my opinion on this acquisition, I must admit I'm actually quite optimistic given that Paradox has been quite fair towards all of the studios underneath its wing, even those that have ended up creating games outside of the strategy genre. More importantly, all of the Shadowrun games were developed on a fairly tight budged and they ended up being pretty darn excellent despite that, so it's going to be interesting to see what sort of RPG Harebrained Schemes will be able to cook up now that they have some serious resources behind them!
Whether they're going to be working on an RPG next, however, that still remains to be seen. Once more information comes in I'll make sure to let you know, but you can also stay in the loop yourself by ocasionally visiting the Paradox website.