id Software co-founder John Romero says his studio’s Xbox-cancelled first-person shooter has found a new publisher, and Romero Games has brought 10 laid-off developers back onto the project.
The studio’s FPS, announced in 2022 as an all-new IP, reportedly had Xbox as its unannounced publisher and was seemingly cancelled in the summer of 2025, in the wake of what have become yearly rounds of layoffs at Xbox. The team of 110 people fell to as few as five before the new deal arrived, Romero confirmed on October 30 in remarks reported by GamesRadar+. That publisher relationship has not been officially confirmed by either Romero Games or Microsoft, and Romero declines to name the new publishing partner.
A different game, not a finished one
The cancelled project cannot simply be picked back up, Romero said. “That game we can’t get to the end, because it’s a 110-person game. So this is a complete redesign of a totally different game, but it uses a lot of the work that we had in the previous games.”
Art, weapons and other assets from the shelved version carried over to the redesign, which Romero said gave the remaining team a significant head-start. The new game’s scope has been re-planned around the current team’s size rather than the 110-person production it replaces.
The new publisher has also stayed out of the studio’s way, Romero said. “The publisher we’re with right now has zero creative goals for this game. They’re like ‘you make what you want, we’re publishing it, we’re not going to tell you what to make’. That’s the perfect deal, you know?”
For a studio led by one of the people who defined the shooter genre at id Software, the episode shows how quickly a single publisher’s cuts can push an independent studio toward closure, and how a salvage operation works when the money comes back: reuse the art, rescope around whoever is left, and keep the publisher quiet. Romero’s earlier games and their modern successors remain benchmarks for the genre his studio is now rebuilding in miniature.
Romero said the studio is content at its current scale: the game is scoped for a team that size, and no title, publisher name, platform or release date has been announced for the redesigned FPS.
