John Romero's shooter, the one that lost its Xbox funding, isn't dead. It has a new publisher, a much smaller team and a new design built from the old one's parts. That's according to the Doom co-creator himself, speaking to VGC on October 30 during Gamescom Asia.
Neither Romero Games nor the new publisher has put out an announcement we could check directly, and Romero wouldn't name the publisher. Everything below comes from Romero's interview with VGC, which GamesRadar+ and PC Gamer have also reported.
From 110 people to five, and back to about 16
VGC reports that Romero Games confirmed it had lost funding for the unannounced shooter after a publisher, later named as Microsoft, pulled its publishing agreement during a wave of layoffs across the company. At the time, VGC notes, several employees said the "whole studio" had been let go, but Romero Games denied it was closing and said it still hoped another publisher could save the project. GamesRadar+ adds that the studio first announced the game back in 2022 as an "all-new FPS with an original, new IP".
Romero told VGC how the months after that went. "Last year we basically got defunded, like a lot of people did, and so we had to spend time figuring out what we were going to do," he said. The studio kept people on "as long as we could, trying to find funding to finish the game", but eventually had to "do redundancy and then figure out what we're going to do with a super-small team". In his words: "We were 110 people, going down to five."
Now, VGC reports, the studio has "brought 10 people back": the leads of its old sub-teams. Romero said the current team of around 15 to 16 people is likely where it will stay for now.
As for the deal itself, Romero kept it short: "I just contacted somebody that I knew, and we basically did a deal, and so we have a new publisher. Can't say anything about who it is, or when the announce is, or any of that stuff."
Not the same game
The bigger news may be that the game Xbox funded won't be the one that ships. "We're not getting that game to the end," Romero told VGC. "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."
The studio owns all of that work. "We own the name, we own all the IP, all the art, all the graphics, the code and everything," Romero said, so he set out to "design a new game that could use as much of that stuff as possible". VGC reports that characters, art, code assets and weapons have moved across, which Romero says gave the team "a big head-start". It's still a shooter, he said, "but everything else around it is really new".
A publisher with "zero creative goals"
Romero was keen on the shape of the new arrangement. "The publisher we're with right now has zero creative goals for this game," he told VGC. "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?"
Asked by VGC whether he'd work with a large publisher again, he said no, because he wants to stay hands-on: the studio has no producer, and in his view "as soon as you need a producer, you're too big."
PC Gamer points out that the team is now around a tenth of the size it was while Xbox funded it. There's still no name, release window or platform list for the game.
Mason's take: Romero is selling the small-team life hard, and he has a point; PC Gamer notes that his biggest hits came from small teams. But this is still a recovery story, not a victory lap. Most of the 110 people who were making this game aren't any more, and a mystery publisher with no creative demands is a promise we can't see the terms of yet. I'll judge the new game when it has a name and a trailer, but it's good that something survived.
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