Paradox Interactive acquires Harebrained Schemes for at least $7.5 million

Paradox Interactive announced today that it has acquired Harebrained Schemes for at least $7.5 million. Harebrained's management and creative teams will remain the same while the studio continues working on design and development of upcoming titles.

The deal, announced today, gives Paradox 100% of shares for Harebrained Holdings Inc for the aforementioned $7.5 million, "plus an additional purchase price corresponding to 25% of the acquired business' earnings before publishing costs over the next 5 years to the extent such earnings exceed the fixed purchase price."

Harebrained Schemes is responsible for the Shadowrun Returns games, among others, but most recently worked with Paradox for the first time to publish a new entry in the BattleTech franchise, simply dubbed BattleTech. The game was released in April this year after raising nearly $2.8 million on Kickstarter--far above its initial $250,000 goal.

"Mitch [Gitelman] and I started Harebrained to create the kind of story-rich tactical games we loved," said Harebrained Schemes CEO Jordan Weisman, "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."

The acquisition is expected to close later this week.