Project Ethos Boss Claims Peak Confidence While Cutting Staf

"I've 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." That's a direct quote from 31st Union studio head Ben Brinkman, pulled from the same internal memo where he told staff that an undisclosed number of them were losing their jobs. As first reported by GamesIndustry.biz, 2K has laid off employees at the studio behind free-to-play shooter Project Ethos, while simultaneously pitching the game as having "a renewed direction and vision."

I've read a lot of corporate layoff memos over the past two years. They all blur together after a while: the passive voice, the "difficult decisions," the insistence that the people being let go are "valued colleagues." Brinkman's memo hits every beat. But the confidence line is something else. Telling your remaining team that you've never felt better about the project while their former coworkers are clearing their desks isn't leadership. It's dissonance so loud it's almost performance art.

Brinkman, who left Respawn to take over 31st Union in October 2025, wrote that "changes need to be made to our team in order to realize our goals" and that the studio's "success is dependent on our ability to work more quickly and nimbly." Neither 2K nor parent company Take-Two Interactive has confirmed how many employees were affected.

A Game Nobody Asked For, Reworked

Project Ethos itself appears to be shifting shape. When 2K revealed it in October 2024, it was billed as a "roguelike hero shooter." Brinkman's memo now describes it as "a skill-based PvP roguelike experience," dropping the hero shooter framing entirely. GamesIndustry.biz also reported seeing new concept art that suggests a more fantasy-oriented visual identity, moving away from the Fortnite-adjacent look of the original reveal.

That original reveal landed poorly. It arrived just weeks after Sony pulled Concord from sale, and the response was muted enough that former studio head Michael Condrey, who founded 31st Union back in 2019, was reportedly fired in early 2025. The game then went radio silent for over a year. If you want a sense of what it looked like before the apparent pivot, the Ian Games impressions video from the reveal period paints a picture of a game struggling to differentiate itself from a dozen other extraction-adjacent shooters.

This is now the second round of layoffs at 31st Union; a "small number" of employees were cut in January 2024. The studio has existed for nearly seven years and has yet to ship a single product. I struggle to see how anyone inside or outside that building can frame this as confidence-inspiring. A studio that's burned through two leaders, two rounds of layoffs, and at least one creative reboot on a game that generated zero public excitement isn't a studio on the upswing. It's a studio that keeps getting one more chance because the parent company has sunk too much into it to walk away.

Take-Two has form here. The new BioShock game at Cloud Chamber has been in development for years with its own leadership shakeups and layoffs. CEO Strauss Zelnick recently said he's "deeply disappointed" in how long that project is taking. Project Ethos feels like it's on a similar treadmill, except BioShock at least has a proven franchise behind it. Project Ethos has a Steam page and a piece of concept art showing a twisty monolith.

The free-to-play shooter space is brutal right now. Marathon, backed by Bungie and Sony, is struggling to hold players. Concord lasted days. Highguard came and went. Brinkman can describe his vision in whatever terms he likes, but the market for another live-service shooter with roguelike elements is not sitting around waiting for 31st Union to figure out what its game actually is. 2K hasn't announced a release window, and at this point, I'd be surprised if Project Ethos ships in a form that resembles anything we've seen so far.