John and Brenda Romero believe the games industry is in even worse shape than it was in the 1980s, which is a pretty brutal assessment coming from two people who did not learn about the 1983 crash from history books, but lived through it. In their view, the pressure is no longer just on individual studios, but on the basic stability of the entire business.
John Romero and Brenda Romero are two iconic game developers who have spent decades working in the industry. They currently run Romero Games together, a studio many feared might shut down after its Xbox-funded project lost support. The studio ultimately survived, but as the Romeros see it, there is far more to worry about than whether their own team can stay afloat. In an interview with GamesIndustry, they argued that the current state of the business feels worse than the infamous crash period of the 1980s.
Brenda Romero said the industry is in a very bad place, and that very few people have escaped the crisis in some form. Either they have already been hit themselves, their partner has been affected, or they are now living with the fear that it will happen soon. John Romero added that success no longer seems to offer any real protection. He pointed to Battlefield 6, which was the best-selling game of 2025, yet Electronic Arts still laid off developers from the Battlefield Studios teams responsible for making it happen. For Romero, that makes the whole situation increasingly hard to understand.
Even success is no longer enough
At the same time, neither of them has lost their love of making games. Brenda even joked that John’s ideal death would be to be found dead in his chair while coding, and John responded that there are still too many cool things left to make for him to stop. That stubborn passion, however, does not change the fact that their concerns sound less and less like exaggeration.
Beyond Battlefield 6, there is the case of Epic Games, which recently laid off more than 1,000 employees after Fortnite saw a drop in popularity. Big-budget AAA projects, which once seemed to offer at least some degree of job security, are now more expensive, riskier, and less predictable than ever. That has pushed executives toward a far more defensive mindset, where cutting staff quickly becomes the first response instead of the last resort. The worst part is that once those people are pushed out, finding another job in the industry has become harder than ever, no matter how experienced they are.
Microteams may be one of the only survival strategies left
At Romero Games, the solution that gave them the most breathing room was shifting to a microteam structure, something they were effectively forced to do after losing funding last year. According to John Romero, microteams may now be the model best suited to surviving this environment, because they can move faster, operate more cheaply, and adapt more easily in such an unstable market. The Romeros are able to function that way, but even they admit that makes them lucky by today’s standards.
That is what makes their warning land so hard. These are not outside commentators throwing around dramatic headlines, but two developers who were there during the industry’s last major collapse and are now saying that what they see today feels even worse. When people with that kind of memory and credibility talk like this, it is probably worth listening.
Source: WCCFTech, GamesIndustry
