Romero Games Says Studio Survived Funding Shock but Shrunk to Nine Staff

r/Games highlighted a March 27, 2026 GamesIndustry.biz interview with John and Brenda Romero that turned out to be less about nostalgia and more about survival. The pair said Romero Games never actually closed after last summer's funding shock, even though early reports claimed it had shuttered. Brenda Romero said the company and the game both survived, but only after a brutal downsizing period.

The clearest number in the interview is the staffing collapse. According to Brenda, Romero Games had around 110 people last summer and is now down to nine. She describes the redundancy process as painful after years of working with the same people, while John Romero says the hardest part was not being able to communicate with the team the way a close-knit studio normally would. That makes this story more concrete than a general industry-malaise feature: it is a direct account of what one known studio had to do to stay alive.

Just as notable, the unrevealed project itself is still moving forward. The Romeros say the game had been a large co-op title and was just before alpha when the funding was cut. Many assets were already made, which is one reason the project remains viable, but Brenda says it will not be what it was originally going to be. In practical terms, the studio is not announcing a cancellation so much as a forced redesign around a drastically smaller team and a thinner financing base.

The interview also matters because of what it suggests about the mid-budget development environment. The Romeros describe the current climate as worse than the crash they remember from the 1980s, and they connect their own experience to a broader funding squeeze across the industry. That is an interpretation from the studio, not a balance-sheet disclosure, but it helps explain why this staffing story resonated so strongly in r/Games: it puts a recognizable name on pressures many developers say are now systemic.

The careful read, then, is not that Romero Games is back to normal. It is that the studio avoided outright closure at a very high cost. A team of nine is now trying to salvage a project that was built for something much larger, and the people leading it are openly saying the original vision had to shrink. For anyone tracking studio stability, publisher funding, and the health of AA-scale development, that is real news, not just another mood piece about a difficult year.