2K Games confirms layoffs at Project Ethos shooter studio and hints at new design direction: 'It's become clear that changes need to be made'

2K Games studio 31^st Union has confirmed the layoff of an undisclosed number of employees, first reported by GamesIndustry, as it continues to develop Project Ethos, the free-to-play hero shooter announced in 2024.

In a memo sent to 31^st Union employees and shared with PC Gamer, 31^st Union studio head Ben Brinkman, who left Respawn to take the role in October 2025, said "it's become clear that changes need to be made to our team in order to realize our goals and deliver this experience for players."

"Our success is dependent on our ability to work more quickly and nimbly," Brinkman wrote. "To do that, we've made the difficult decision to scale back our team to better align with where we are in development, which unfortunately means parting ways with some valued colleagues today."

It also sounds like Project Ethos itself is undergoing at least a minor change in direction. It was revealed to the world in October 2024 as a "roguelike hero shooter," although as PC Gamer editor Tyler Wilde noted at the time, "it's not really a roguelike: You just get to pick from randomized sets of buffs throughout a match. Otherwise, it's a third-person shooter that resembles Fortnite, but with hero characters who come with unique guns and abilities, and a low-stakes PvPvE extraction mode as its main attraction."

Brinkman, however, described it in somewhat vaguer terms in his layoff message, saying 31^st Union "is committed to building a bold new game with a renewed direction and vision—a skill-based PVP roguelike experience that will challenge and thrill players." He added that the studio has "evolved as a team this past year in what has been a defining period of creative growth."

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I do have to wonder whether 2K has decided that Fortnite-styled extraction/hero shooters are a riskier bet than it seemed a couple years ago. For every Arc Raiders, there's a Highguard (and plenty of others), and not even heavyweights like Bungie are immune from the risks of wading into a genre already dominated by a few major hits: Marathon is a brilliant shooter but it's running one-tenth of Arc Raiders' player counts on Steam, and Sony took an absolute hammering on it.

But it's also notable that this isn't the first time that Project Ethos has shown signs of trouble. Original 31^st Union studio head Michael Condrey was reportedly given the boot just four months after the game was announced, when that reveal—which came just over a month after the disastrous end of Concord, another live service shooter casualty—failed to make much of a splash. And that, as far as I know, was the last we heard of Project Ethos until these layoffs.

The cuts at 31^st Union seem not unlike layoffs made in 2025 at 2K Games studio Cloud Chamber, which is currently working on a new BioShock game. Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick recently said he is "deeply disappointed" that it's taking so long to release a new game in the series, adding that "finding the right creative purchase" on the project has been more difficult than expected—something that sounds like might also apply to 31^st Union and Project Ethos.

Despite everything, Brinkman said he's "never been more confident in the future of our game, this team, and the commitment and investment Take-Two and 2K leadership continue to show."