From Lost Funding To A Fresh Start
Romero Games, the studio founded by legendary developers Brenda and John Romero, came very close to shutting its doors in 2024. In the middle of Microsoft’s massive layoffs of more than 9,000 employees, the studio abruptly lost funding for its in development first person shooter. Over 100 people had been working on the project for years, and suddenly the money was gone.
At the time, things looked grim. The Romeros publicly said they were doing everything in their power to keep the studio alive, but there were no clear answers about what would happen to the game or the team.
Fast forward to 2025, and there is finally some good news. During a panel at Spain’s Salón del Videojuego de Madrid 2025, John Romero confirmed that Romero Games has survived and is now working on a redesigned shooter project. The original big budget game is gone, but its DNA lives on in a new indie style FPS.
What Really Happened To The Original Shooter
According to Romero, the cancelled project was massive. Around 110 developers were working on it every day, and years of effort had already gone into the game. Then the publisher pulled out. While Romero Games has not been allowed to officially name the company because of confidentiality agreements, reporting strongly suggests it was Microsoft, especially given the timing with Microsoft’s huge round of layoffs.
The loss of funding forced Romero Games to stop work on the original version of the shooter and to reassess the entire studio. That kind of decision has real human consequences. A lot of people suddenly found their roles and future plans in limbo. For a studio of that size, losing a big publishing deal can be enough to close the doors entirely.
Instead of folding, Romero Games chose a different route. Romero explained that the original game represented roughly fifty million dollars worth of development. That is code, art, design systems and tech that the team had already built. Rather than walking away from all of it, they decided to salvage and repurpose as much as possible for a new project.
The result is a completely redesigned game. Romero says the new shooter has nothing to do with the previous title in terms of overall design, story or scope. However, the team can still take pieces and elements from that huge earlier effort and plug them into their new vision. That means they are not starting from ground zero, even though creatively it is a fresh start.
A Smaller Indie Shooter With Big Ideas
The new game Romero Games is building is intentionally smaller in scope. Instead of chasing a giant, publisher funded AAA shooter, the studio is now focused on something closer to an indie sized project. For the developers still there, that change has actually made the work more enjoyable.
In the previous setup, Romero says many of the people on the team were department directors. That meant a lot of management and oversight, but not much hands on development. In a leaner team, those same people get to dive back into what they are really good at, whether that is coding, level design, combat design or art.
Romero is a big fan of small teams for exactly this reason. With fewer layers of management, each developer has more direct impact on the final game. Decisions are quicker, iteration can be faster and there is more room for experimentation. That approach has also been behind some of the most beloved indie games on PC in recent years.
While he could not reveal concrete details about mechanics, story or release timing, Romero did share how the game feels conceptually. He describes it as a shooter where the things you do feel genuinely new. To explain the vibe, he compared the experience to exploring Elden Ring for the first time.
Romero is not saying his game will play like a soulslike. Instead, he is pointing to the sense of discovery that Elden Ring delivered, where every area had weird sights, strange encounters and lots of moments that made players say what is that. That is the mood he wants to capture inside a shooter framework.
For PC gamers, that is an interesting pitch. Most first person shooters fall into familiar patterns: tight arena style gunplay, tactical military realism or hero shooter ability kits. When someone like John Romero says he is working on an FPS that feels different, it is worth paying attention. After all, his work on Doom helped define what the genre is in the first place.
The project is still under wraps, and we will likely be waiting a while before we see gameplay or get performance details for PC builds. But the core story is clear. A studio that almost collapsed after losing a huge publisher deal has pulled itself back up by reusing its own tech, scaling down scope and putting its veteran developers directly back in the trenches.
For the wider PC gaming scene, this is a good reminder of how fragile big-budget game development can be, and how flexible smaller, more independent projects often are. If Romero Games can turn fifty million dollars worth of cancelled work into a fresh indie shooter that actually brings something new to the FPS genre, it could be one of the more interesting surprises on upcoming PC release lists.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/legendary-fps-developer-john-romero-says-his-studio-survived-the-cancellation-of-our-huge-game-and-its-shooter-project-will-be-new-to-people-the-way-that-going-through-elden-ring-was-a-really-new-experience/
