Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has gone on record telling anyone who will listen that the company's long-gestating, recently rebooted online shooter Project Ethos is still on track to be a "massive hit" - and look, we admire the hustle. According to GamesIndustry.biz, Zelnick made these comments despite fully acknowledging the escalating challenges facing the live-service shooter market.
And when they say "escalating challenges," they mean the genre is currently more cursed than a no-hit run of Elden Ring with a broken controller. Even Bungie - the studio that basically invented the modern live-service shooter template with Destiny - has been running into serious difficulties lately, which should be at least a yellow flag, if not a full-on red screen of death.
Sir, the map is on fire
Project Ethos has been in development long enough to have its own Wikipedia disambiguation page worth of history, having recently gone through a reboot that would make even a Resident Evil fan blush. The live-service shooter space has become a genuine gauntlet, with high-profile projects dropping like NPCs in a wave-shooter on maximum difficulty.
The recent track record for new entries in this space reads like a list of discontinued limited-time events: Concord got server-wiped after barely two weeks, Hyenas got cancelled before launch, and even established players are shedding players and studio staff at an alarming rate. Yet here comes Take-Two, loading up for one more respawn.
To be fair though...
Look, it would be easy to dunk on this indefinitely, but Zelnick isn't entirely deluded here. Take-Two does have the financial bench depth to actually see a live-service project through its rough early patches, which is more than most publishers can say. And there absolutely is still a massive audience hungry for the next great online shooter - the genre isn't dead, it's just incredibly unforgiving right now.
Whether Project Ethos has the secret sauce to crack that market remains a complete mystery, since Take-Two has been about as forthcoming with actual gameplay details as a FromSoftware NPC with lore. But Zelnick seems locked in, and we'll be watching the respawn timer with great interest.
