Romero Games working on smaller shooter that borrows from its cancelled project

Ireland-based Romero Games is working on a new, smaller project that lifts heavily from the shooter it had been working on but was cancelled by its publisher.

Speaking on stage at Salón del Videojuego de Madrid 2025 – as reported by Eurogamer – industry veteran John Romero said that the studio had “survived” the aforementioned title’s cancellation, adding that this has been “completely redesigned”.

The new project is “much smaller” and is pulling elements from the cancelled shooter.

Romero also mentions that the cancelled title represents “50 million worth of game”, which is the first insight into what kind of scale the project had.

“So we survived the cancellation of our huge game,” Romero said.

“We had a really good 110 people working on the game every day for years. The game’s been basically completely redesigned. The new game has nothing to do with the previous game, but incorporates a lot of the elements that we had in the previous game. We’re not starting at ground zero.

“We have 50 million worth of game that we can take pieces out of and put into a brand new indie game. We have a lot of stuff we can put in the game. The design is completely different, but the team is very excited about the new design. It’s a much smaller game, but it’s more fun for us because the people working on it were all directors of different departments and they didn’t actually get to code or design or whatever themselves, now we get to actually do the thing that we’re really good at ourselves. That’s why small teams are great.”

Romero Games announced in July that it was cancelling its in-development first-person shooter title after the publisher for the project pulled funding.

Though the identity of this publisher has never been made public, reports pointed towards it being Microsoft. News that Romero Games’ title had been cancelled also occurred at the same time that the Xbox firm set about a restructuring process that saw around 9,000 staff seeing their jobs cut, in addition to numerous project cancellations and studio closures.

Romero Games later shot down rumours that it was closing down as a result of this title being cancelled.