2K lays off 31st Union staff, as Project Ethos continues development

31st Union is losing staff even as Project Ethos keeps moving, a contrast that captures how publishers are now trying to preserve ambitious games by trimming teams rather than pulling the plug.

2K laid off an undisclosed number of employees at 31st Union, the San Mateo, California studio behind the free-to-play Project Ethos. The game is still in development, and 2K’s own materials continue to describe it as a third-person roguelike hero shooter. For developers, the message is blunt: the project survived, but the headcount did not.

That matters because Project Ethos has already gone through several stress tests. 2K and 31st Union unveiled it in October 2024, and the game held its first community playtest that same month. By February 2025, Michael Condrey had been ousted amid criticism over the project’s progress, even as 2K said it remained committed to both the game and the studio. In October 2025, Ben Brinkman took over as studio head, replacing Condrey and signaling a reset around pace and execution.

Brinkman’s internal message made the tradeoff clear: he said the team had a renewed direction and vision, but also needed to work more quickly and nimbly. The downsizing, in that framing, was part of making the studio fit the plan rather than abandoning the plan itself. That is an increasingly familiar pattern across live-service and always-on projects, where management tries to protect the core game while shifting more pressure onto the remaining staff.

For Nintendo employees, the warning sign is not only the layoff itself but the sequence around it. A project that keeps surviving leadership changes and staff cuts can still be under real strain, especially when a publisher is trying to keep new intellectual property alive. Designers and producers should read that as a reminder that scope discipline matters early. QA, localization, and production teams should see how staffing changes can quickly alter content volume, milestone timing, and release planning. Business teams can see the underlying logic: preserve the franchise opportunity, reduce the organizational weight, and push the remaining team to prove the game’s value faster.

31st Union has already been through one earlier reduction, with GamesIndustry.biz noting a small round of layoffs in January 2025. Taken together, the cuts show a studio in extended restructuring, not a clean restart. For workers across Nintendo’s global development network, that is the new definition of “healthy” development in parts of the industry: not growth at any cost, but a team size management thinks can still carry the project over the finish line.