This Is Why PlayStation Dropped Kojima’s New Game ‘Physint’

I’m still recovering from the shocking news that Hideo Kojima would be taking his latest game, Physint away from PlayStation and instead have it published by Microsoft.

Kojima and Sony have had a decade’s long partnership, from the old days of Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation in 1998, to Death Stranding 2 on PS5 in 2025. So, yes, I am in shock.

You can read more about the breaking news here, but reasons as to how this shift happened have come to light in a recent article by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg.

They include ‘concerns over budget, potential profitability and exclusivity, according to people familiar with the project’.

So let’s break it down.

Performance

One of the major reasons for the decision to let Kojima’s game go was that his previous series, Death Stranding and it’s sequel, hadn’t met expectations in terms of revenue

This reason has come at a pretty ironic time considering Death Stranding 2 has just hit 2.5 million copies sold worldwide.

PlayStation have declined to comment what those revenue expectations were.

Investment & Deadlines

At the start of the year, PlayStation announced they would no longer be releasing it’s single player PlayStation games to PC, which came after a time fans of the company were worried that the console was starting to lose its catalogue of exclusives.

In the Bloomberg article it was said that PlayStation were ‘reluctant to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in another game that wouldn’t remain permanently exclusive to the company’s own hardware.’

Both Death Stranding games were ‘timed’ exclusives which meant that they would eventually be released to other platforms, so perhaps Physint would have followed suit.

Other reasons included that the new project had ‘missed deadlines and was on track to be well over budget despite being years away from release‘ and that ‘Sony executives who were close to Kojima left the company a while ago‘.

All of this has seemed to create the opposite of a perfect storm, with an implied strained relationship that has ended with PlayStation losing out on a major title to their main competitor.

It seems its looking up for Xbox in this newfound partnership with Kojima that seems only be getting stronger. A spokesperson from Xbox has said:

“We believe in his team’s ability to build AAA games with groundbreaking, new IP and we believe in OD, Physint, and our growing partnership.”