Last year was something of an annus horribilis for Romero Games. Faced with a sudden funding rug pull, the studio has had to downsize dramatically. But it’s still hanging in there.
Romero Games was set up in Galway, Ireland just over a decade ago by John and Brenda Romero, gaming’s foremost power couple. John, of course, is most well known for his pioneering work on Doom in the 1990s, the game that helped to kickstart the first-person shooter genre, while Brenda has an enormously long list of game credits that takes in titles like Jagged Alliance 2 and Wizardry 8.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz ahead of Game Republic’s Dark and Doomy event in Wakefield last week, John and Brenda reflected on the hardships they’ve faced over the past year, and the state of the industry more generally.
“I feel like the industry’s in a really horrible place,” says Brenda, likening it to the US video game crash of 1983. “I mean, we were there in the 80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier. There are so few people that have not been affected, or their partner’s affected, or they’re worried about being affected. It’s a really difficult time right now.”
Both agree that it’s difficult to see how it will all end. John points out that Battlefield 6 did “really, really well,” only for EA to make layoffs in the studios behind it. “I don’t understand what that’s all about.”
Brenda is confident that people are “going to keep playing games”, but she struggles to comprehend how the industry crisis will be resolved. “This is really one of those times where I don’t know. And you hear behind the scenes, there’s tremendous push toward teams using generative AI, there’s tremendous pushback from teams and from gamers about using generative AI… And before you ask, we’re not using generative AI. So I don’t know.
“I know that we’re going to be OK for the next little bit. And if something falls over sideways, and 2027 is another ‘exciting’ year, we’ve both had a good run.”
“I’m not going to stop making games,” John chips in.
“Yeah,” chuckles Brenda, “I say that for him, a win would be he’s found dead in his chair coding.”
Given the huge impact John has already had on the industry, it would be understandable if he wanted to simply rest on his laurels and reflect on past glories, given the headwinds both Romero Games and the industry more widely are facing. But he’s determined to keep going.
“There’s too much cool stuff to make,” he says.
Still, surely the words echoing in everyone’s heads right now are that if even John and Brenda Romero are struggling – two of the biggest names in the business – then what hope do the rest of us have?
A terrible year
Brenda says that both she and John celebrated 2025 coming to an end, a year that plunged Romero Games into an existential crisis. Last summer, the funding was pulled for its upcoming, as-yet-unrevealed shooter, an event that coincided with Microsoft’s sweeping cutbacks at Xbox.
Brenda won’t (or more likely can’t) name names. “How do I want to say it? We were working on a game with a major publisher, and along with a number of other studios and internal projects, we lost our funding.”
Initial reports that Romero Games was set to close proved wide of the mark. “That was frustrating because what happened is an Irish media site said, ‘Romero Games has shuttered its doors,’ which in fact we’d not done,” explains Brenda. “They reached out to me at 8:15 on a Friday night – I was on a ferry – and then within 20, 30 minutes, they’d already published it. So a lot of US outlets picked it up.
“Anyway, that publication has since apologized for jumping the gun. But no, we never closed. And it was obviously a super, super turbulent time. But we talked to a ton of different places and the company survived and the game survived.”
Not without casualties, however. Brenda says that around 110 people were working at the studio last summer – that number is now down to nine.
She says she has a feeling of survivor’s guilt after going through the lengthy redundancy process. “It was really hard because a lot of us had been working together for ten years. I mean, it was obviously hardest on the people who were ultimately made redundant. But yeah, it sucked. It’s the worst. There’s nothing worse than that.”
John adds that the redundancy process was especially difficult because “you can’t really communicate with everybody the way you normally communicate. And we’re a team. We hung out with each other all the time, and we like talking to each other.”
“I think John and I both try to be positive people. And so if something doesn’t happen, something else will happen”
Both are pressing ahead with the new game, but naturally the scope has had to be reduced now the funding has disappeared. “The size of the game is dictated by the size of the team and the amount of time,” explains John. “We don’t want to take forever to get the game done, but we have a pretty big game to work with.”
He notes that many of the assets have already been made, “so it’s bigger than you would expect.”
“It’s a huge game,” confirms Brenda, adding that it uses co-op throughout. “And so co-op everywhere means it’s an expensive game. We were just before alpha [when the funding was cut], so there’s still a lot left [to do].”
Necessarily, the project has now departed from the original grand vision. “It will not be what it was going to be,” says Brenda. “But we’re going forward. I think John and I both try to be positive people. And so if something doesn’t happen, something else will happen, and we’ll just go forward.”
“We’ve had pretty bad things happen, then something incredibly great happened right after it,” agrees John. “We feel that way about the game as well. I’m pretty happy with the direction that we’re going.”
A changing industry
The bigger worry, however, is that the kind of AA territory in which Romero Games has been working is the exact area that has been hit the hardest by the current industry crisis. Even though games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 have shown that massive hits can emerge from the AA sector, many publishers are preferring to hedge their bets on smaller titles with budgets of $1 million or less, while the big players are going all in with huge budgets that offer the potential of correspondingly huge payoffs.
John acknowledges that micro teams are “where it’s at right now.”
“I mean, we got to a micro team,” adds Brenda. “Not the way we would have opted to get to a micro team, but we got there.”
Their game is anything but micro, however. John says that years of work have left them with a “huge amount of content.” But trying to take all that content – much of which is unfinished – and turn it into a finished game with just a handful of people is where the challenge lies.
Still, John remains upbeat, noting that the process of learning Unreal Engine 5 is now behind them, after their previous title, Empire of Sin, shipped on Unity. “The nice thing is we have a lot of experience with Unreal now, so even with the refocused design, we’re already ahead of the game [by] knowing Unreal.”
“The people we work with are not under this illusion of like, you know, ‘Let’s make the thing that’ll take out Battlefield’,” says Brenda. “It’s just, let’s make the best game we can make that we’re capable of making right now with this design. Let’s just focus on it, and forget the hype train, and let’s have fun doing it with people we really love working with.”
Ridiculous nerds
Despite all the hardships that John and Brenda have faced, one thing that’s abundantly clear from our conversation is just how passionate they are about games – and about each other.
Brenda admits to a “hardcore” Balatro obsession that is currently seeing her chase the elusive Completionist++ achievement. “I’ve already golded every deck,” she says. “So this is the only thing I have left. And I say to John, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life when it’s [over]. I guess I’ll just delete it and start again.”
In short, she says, “We still get a lot of joy from games.”
“We play Minecraft a lot,” adds John. “We love Minecraft.” Brenda says they often play it together online when John’s travelling. John says he likes to “kill stuff,” while Brenda is more about looking for diamonds.
“We still get a lot of joy from games”
Even though they first met nearly 40 years ago, it’s obvious that they still very much enjoy each other’s company. “We love working together,” smiles Brenda. “We’re lucky that way. We’re together all the time, and we also work with two of our kids.”
“I mean, we’re fundamentally just ridiculous nerds and we’ve basically given rise to a family of ridiculous nerds. We’re always talking about games, unless we have somebody over who’s not [into them]. And then the whole family tries to have a conversation about whatever – which will eventually return to games.”
And even though it feels like the games industry is burning down around their ears right now, they still have hope for the future. “There are people like LocalThunk, there are people like Ed McMillen, there are people who are still going to make games,” concludes Brenda.
“It can’t stay like this forever.”
