John Romero confirms his studio & next game have a new publisher

John Romero has confirmed that Romero Games has found itself a new publisher for its next game, and was even able to hire some of its staff back in the process.

Romero shared this in a conversation with Video Games Chronicle. According to Romero, it was a bit of a rescue mission for the studio and game, and there’s much that cannot be discussed just yet:

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.

Follow @romerogamesltd if you’re interested in game industry history, too. ⤵️⤵️ The community team is putting together a bunch of retrospectives as requested.

— John Romero 🤘🏽 (@romero) October 17, 2026

Romero went on to say that the team was able to hire about 10 people back, bringing the team to around 15, which is where he wants to keep it for the new scale of the game.

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… I mean, it’s a shooter – that part totally makes sense – but everything else around it is really new, and everybody on the team is so excited. We’re very excited with how the game is turning out.

But is it the same game as it was before Xbox cut funding amid new CEO Asha Sharma’s layoffs? No, not quite. It’s a scaled-down game built to take advantage of the team that Romero Games has, rather than the 110-person team it wanted for the Xbox game.

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. So it’s like ‘here’s all these characters that we can move over,’ you know?

With Romero Games back on track to build its next thing, we’ll look forward to hearing about it, and you can too by following the Romero Games topic.