Romero Games announced last week that they’d lost funding for their upcoming FPS in the wake of Microsoft’s latest mass layoff spree. According to one employee who spoke to Irish outlet The Journal (the studio is based in Galway), Romero Games have now closed, via PC Gamer.
The closure has affected 100 workers, writer The Journal, with one anonymous staff member calling it “a big shock” – especially since they’d had meetings with “the publisher” the day before. While the publisher aren’t named directly, former staff have mentioned Microsoft cuts in their announcements.
The anonymous staffer had “suspected something might be coming given recent layoffs at Microsoft,” write the Journal. But, as echoed in Romero Games’s statement that they’d “hit every milestone on time, consistently received high praise, and easily passed our internal gates”, they assumed the project was progressing well.
“It seemed so far away for us. The title was pretty well developed at the time,” the anonymous staffer told The Journal. For now, they say, the project is “completely closed, and the studio is closed”, though add that they’re still “trying to find other ways of funding the project.”
The unnamed FPS has “already had significant interest”, wrote chief technical officer Keith O’Conor in a LinkedIn post offering hiring recommendations for former staff. He described the interest as “really heartening… but right now our priority is making sure our people are taken care of”.
John Romero announced the shooter in 2022, a new IP made in Unreal Engine 5. Details have remained scant since. Prior to this, Romero’s most recent new FPS project was his and Adrian Carmack’s Blackroom – a game full of “ruined Victorian mansions”, “wild west ghost towns” and “treacherous pirate galleons”, itself cancelled in 2016.
