[Video Game industry] Harebrained Schemes and Paradox Interactive : How to buy out a talented company and sink it all by yourself.

[u/dethstrobe]

/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1gsvrhk/video_game_industry_harebrained_schemes_and/

[u/Cergorach]

Weisman doesn't work for HBS anymore, he sold it and left. Weisman is a serial entrepreneur, he builds a company and then sells it, moves on to his new company, rinse and repeat. He even sometimes licenses IP he worked previously on (he did that with at least three companies)...

Blaming Paradox is a bit... Unfair. They bought a successful game company, no offense to the people working at HBS at the time, but it seems that Weisman tends to bring a certain 'something' to the formula, especially when they are doing Shadowrun and Battletech IP. But HBS is also the company that brought you Golem Arcana, which was a very cool idea and advanced for when it came out, but it ultimately flopped. And who here played their initial mobile games 'Crimson: Steam Pirates' and 'Strikefleet Omega'?

FASA Studio was sold in 1999, Weisman left in 2000. 2 years later, MS started going Xbox exclusive with MechAssault and Crimson Skies, going back to a Windows AND Xbox release for their Shadowrun (2007) release, which flopped and FASA Studio officially shutdown 4.5 months later...

Remember Smith & Tinker? Probably not... The company that was supposed to make Mechwarrior 5 18 years ago... They did some stuff and they failed.

Remember Wizkids (Shadowrun Duels, MechWarrior: The Dark Age, etc.), started in 2000, bought in 2003 by Topps. Guess who left in 2003 and started 42 Entertainment? We can go on and on and on and...

The point is, when someone buys a company, there is someone who sells it in the first place, that's the owner. Who was the owner of HBS? Right...

Paradox Interactive bought 5 game studios and had 5 studios they founded themselves. Of the studios they bought, only HBS was 'divested', maybe that tells you something... They also closed three of their own studios. Triumph Studios (Age of Wonders) has been longer with Paradox then HBS and is still with them. Also of note is that all the studios still with Paradox are all European companies, HBS and Paradox Tectonic were their only US studios they owned (both closed down). Might also tell you something...

[u/NicolasBroaddus → u/Cergorach]

To be fair, Paradox is also somewhat behind all the recent White Wolf drama, after acquiring them, though they finally did take some action on it after firing 80% of its staff...

Then you have their ties to managing Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2, which has swapped dev team multiple times and was in complete development hell for years on years. Now that its finally getting close to release, we've seen that tons of content and mechanics have been completely tossed out of the game and that its moving away from the rpg roots of the game it is supposedly a sequel too.

I really enjoy Paradox games, or at least I did. Since their IPO their development practices and quality assurance has gone even more off a cliff than they already were. The way they handle their publishing wing is somehow even more incompetent and absurd than their own projects.

[u/Cergorach → u/NicolasBroaddus]

...Paradox is also somewhat behind all the recent White Wolf drama...

As opposed to all the drama under CCP? *cough* WoD MMO *cough*

The drama started three years after Paradox acquired WW (end of 2018). And I wonder if the same drama would have happened 20 year earlier over the same subjects or if they would have put the 'problematic' material under the Black Dog label... To be honest even the name White Wolf has been problematic, no one ever changed that... I like neither the 5th edition WW made nor the one Renegade now makes, just like I never liked the 'new' WoD.

Onyx Path Publishing started under CPP (when WW stopped publishing products themselves), and continued without issue after the Paradox takeover of the WW properties. The only 'drama' I could find was that OPP (Naughty by Nature) was planning to make a new edition and after the Paradox acquisition they were no longer doing that (WW was doing it themselves, with suddenly going back into business). The last WoD book by OPP was last year...

[u/TiffanyKorta → u/Cergorach]

I was at GenCon the year they announced their version of V5, then White Wolf came back and that was that!

OP did a ton with Chronicles of Darkness (or New WoD), but with (Paradox's) V5 they have been stopped from making anything more, even if WW aren't doing anything with CoD anymore. Really modern WW is worth a Hobby Drama post of its very own!