Paradox are buying Haemimont Games, developers of Surviving Mars and several Tropico games

rockpapershotgun.com:

Paradox are buying Bulgarian game developer Haemimont Games, the developers of strategy games including several in the Tropico and Jagged Alliance series. The two companies previously worked together on Surviving Mars, which was originally developed by Haemimont and published by Paradox Interactive.

In a press release, Paradox attributed the acquisition to their "strategic focus on growing in the management games genre."

"They bring a tight-knit team with long experience in developing management games with many well received projects in their portfolio. Moreover, they have a strong creative streak, technology developed for their niche, a new IP in development and a strong culture that fits Paradox’s way of working," says Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester in the press release.

Haemimont have been producing strategy games of various kinds since 2000, often doing work-for-hire development on sequels for series created by others. They developed Tropico 3, 4 and 5, all published by Kalypso, and 2023's Jagged Alliance 3, published by THQ Nordic. They don't own the rights to those IP, so don't expect future entries in either series from Haemimont and Paradox.

This acquisition does reunite Haemimont with Surviving Mars, the citybuilder they developed for Paradox about building a home on the red planet. Three years after release, ongoing development of DLC was taken over by a different studio, Abstraction Games, while Haemimont moved off to other projects. Paradox Interactive published two further spiritual successors developed by other teams: Iceflake Studios' post-apocalyptic citybuilder Surviving The Aftermath and Rocket Flair Studios' deep-sea citybuilder Surviving The Abyss. Neither successor was as well received as the first, which Alec had enjoyed a lot in his Surviving Mars review. The press release only names an unnamed "new IP", however, so who knows whether anything Surviving-based might come of this down the line.

Paradox have been having a rough time recently, and