BattleTech Developer Harebrained Schemes Acquired by Paradox Interactive

Giuseppe Nelva June 5, 2018 2:11 PM EST

Paradox Interactive, the publisher behind Europa Universalis, acquired Harebrained Schemes, and they have a gift for BattleTech's backers.

Today popular publisher Paradox Interactive reached out with a press release to announce that it acquired Harebrained Schemes, that recently successfully released BattleTech under Paradox’s flag.

Harebrained Schemes will henceforth act as an internal studio and its own division within the Paradox Interactive organization, but it will still be led by its own internal management and retain its creative teams.

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 followed up with his own statement, mentioning how the financial stability and marketing expertise provided by Paradox will help the team.

“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, talking how the acquisition is a good fit for the developer.

“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”

Incidentally, Paradox has a gift for those who backed BattleTech. All of them will receive a copy of Stellaris with details to be released in the near future.

As an added bonus, we learn that besides working on updates and DLC for BattleTech, Harebrained Schemes is starting the concept phase on a new game.

If you’re curious about BattleTech, which sparked the acquisition, you can check out our rather enthusiastic review.