John Romero's axed Xbox shooter has a new publisher and a smaller scope

John Romero's next shooter is alive again. The id Software co-founder told VGC and IGN this week that Romero Games' FPS, which lost its funding during Microsoft's cuts in 2025, has signed with a new publisher.

Romero Games announced back in 2022 that it was making an "all-new FPS with an original, new IP". After the project was seemingly cancelled in the summer of 2025, it became clear the unannounced publisher had been Xbox.

The fallout was rough. The studio went from 110 people down to five at one point. Romero told VGC the team kept staff on "as long as we could, trying to find funding to finish the game" before it had to make redundancies.

"It really sucked," Romero told IGN. "[But] I don't have bitterness because that's not who I am, really. I always move forward."

Now the studio has "brought 10 people back," according to Romero, and the returning developers were "the leads of the different sub-teams that we had."

Don't expect the game that was in development at Xbox, though. Romero told VGC, "We're not getting that game to the end," calling the new project "a complete redesign of a totally different game." He says it's scoped for the smaller team: "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."

IGN, which spoke to him at Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show 2026, reports he's comparing the new game to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, though Romero didn't share much beyond that. "I can't talk about the publisher, the release date, you know, anything that we're doing, what it is, it's up to them," he said.