id Software co-founder John Romero said his studio’s first-person shooter, reportedly dropped by Xbox amid Microsoft layoffs, has a new publisher, and the deal has brought back 10 laid-off developers.
The numbers behind the rescue are stark. The project, an original IP announced in 2022, was built by a team of 110 people before it was seemingly cancelled in the summer of 2025, a cut that reportedly came amid Microsoft’s layoffs. Romero said the studio’s headcount fell to five people at its lowest point, and that Romero Games has since brought ten of those people back to work on the game.
A 110-person game is unfinishable, so it was redesigned
Romero is blunt about what the cut meant for the original build: it can no longer be finished. “We’re not getting that game to the end. 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.”
Rather than throwing out years of production, the team moved existing art, weapons and other assets into the redesign, which Romero said gave the small team a big head start. Salvageable work turns a cancellation from a total loss into a starting point, and it is the difference between a studio that can keep going after a publisher walks and one that cannot.
Scope matched to the team, and a publisher with no demands
The redesign is sized to the people who are left. Romero said the scope has been re-planned around the team’s current size, and that the studio is content at that scale. “We don’t need to be bigger than that, the game is scoped for a team that’s that size and we’re just super happy.”
The publishing deal matters as much as the math. Romero declined to name the new publisher but said it has no creative goals for the game, describing a partner that will fund the project and stay out of its design entirely. For a studio one canceled contract away from closing, that hands-off arrangement is the security the last deal lacked.
