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Harebrained Schemes was acquired by Paradox Interactive shortly after the release of BattleTech, which turned out to be yet another successful title from the devs that was crowdfunded on Kickstarter.
This was preceded by the Shadowrun trilogy and things just kept looking up for the dev studio but it would take only one title afterwards to lose all that momentum as Paradox considered The Lamplighters League to be under their expectations.
The whole episode went under the radar mostly but started crawling up just days before an official announcement that the two parties went their separate ways.
First, the news of 80 per cent of Harebrained Schemes being laid off in July 2023 popped up on October 10 via someone who claimed to be an ex-employee. At first, it may have looked suspicious but their claims that a lot of former Harebrained Schemes devs were looking for jobs checked out.
The same person noted that there were pitches for a new BattleTech game but Paradox refused as they wanted their own IP to avoid paying licensing fees to Microsoft.
One week later, Paradox Interactive announced that they would be parting ways with Harebrained Schemes entirely. This is going to be pretty rough for the studio as they have just a small fraction of their former workforce now.
Additionally, Paradox will retain ownership of The Lamplighters League so it seems like Harebrained Schemes is back to square one in that department as well. The studio will become independent once more on January 1, 2023.
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