In July, Romero Games, the game studio founded by industry legends Brenda and John Romero, announced in the midst of Microsoft's mass layoffs of over 9,000 employees that it had lost funding for its in-development shooter project. While the developer said days later that it was "doing everything in our power to ensure" it stayed open, the state of the studio and the fate of its shooter production remained unclear throughout the following months.
This week, during a panel at Spain's Salón del Videojuego de Madrid 2025 (via Eurogamer), John Romero confirmed that Romero Games has avoided closure and is continuing work on an overhauled shooter project. You can watch Romero discussing the status of his studio in the video embedded below.
"We survived the cancellation of our huge game," Romero said, earning applause from the audience. According to Romero, his studio had "110 people working on the game every day for years" when its publisher—presumed to be Microsoft based on previous reporting, but who Romero Games said it "cannot disclose" due to confidentiality agreements—pulled its funding.
But while Romero indicated that the studio was forced to cease its previous project, it was able to repurpose a substantial amount of its previous work for its current in-development shooter.
"The game's been basically completely redesigned. The new game has nothing to do with the previous game, but it incorporates a lot of the elements that we had in the previous game, so we're not starting at ground zero," Romero said. "We have $50 million worth of a game we can take pieces out of and put into a brand new indie game."
The new shooter is "a much smaller game," but Romero said the change in scope is "more fun" for its developers, who now have a more hands-on development role—though presumably less fun for anyone whose employment might have been affected by Romero Games being forced to "reassess the entire staffing of our studio," as it said in July.
"The people working on it were all directors of different departments and they didn't actually get to code or design or whatever themselves," Romero said. "Now we get to actually do the thing that we're really good at ourselves. That's why small teams are great."
While Romero couldn't share details about the game's design, he said he's "never played a game like it before—other than it's a shooter."
"The things that you do in it will be new to people the way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience," Romero said. "It was a very crazy place and a different world, and it was really cool to explore it and just see 'What is that?' That's the idea behind what we're doing in this game."
It's a big pitch, but after his work on Doom, it wouldn't be Romero's first revelatory shooter. We'll have to wait and see for ourselves.
