Paradox Interactive has announced they’re planning to acquire Harebrained Schemes, the indie studio known for games like Shadowrun Returns, Necropolis, and most recently – Battletech.

The publisher has entered an agreement with the developer to wholly acquire them, making them an internal studio under their publishing brand.

Harebrained Schemes was founded back in 2011 by industry veterans Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman, with Weisman being the creator of multiple classic gaming universes like Shadowrun, Crimson Skies, and BattleTech/MechWarrior. In essence, Paradox can now tap those IPs for new games if they wanted.

“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.”

To celebrate the news, Paradox is offering a free copy of Stellaris to every player who backed Battletech on Kickstarter.

Battletech is now available for Windows PC and Mac. A Linux version of the game is also planned after the main release.