PlayStation drops Hideo Kojima’s Physint: Xbox picked it up
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I have covered the industry long enough to recognize the work going on behind the scenes in those carefully crafted sentences. The tweet by PlayStation on Wednesday about it “stepping away” from Hideo Kojima’s Physint project was one such piece of carefully constructed prose, full of warm words and gratitude for all those “three decades” of collaboration. On first reading, it is a gracious good-bye tweet. But read it once again, a couple of minutes after Microsoft’s announcement that Xbox will be publishing the game, and you will understand that the tweet was just damage control.
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The reason is quite simple: this is what happened, according to Hideo Kojima himself. The project was cancelled in mid-June by PlayStation Studios without any prior notice. Sony wanted the project completely scrapped. And that’s no “stepping away.”
What concerns me most is what both companies don’t say. Not a single gameplay footage or demonstration has been shared since the 2024 announcement, which is the very behavior that usually indicates financial or scheduling issues and not creative problems. This all correlates with every other information about Physint. It was always marketed as some weird project different from an ordinary game, basically as a fusion between a game and a movie, and untested pitches like this one are exactly what gets quietly canned during belt-tightening at studios. There is another, not-so-complimentary number out there: Death Stranding 2 has allegedly sold about 2 million copies on PS5 despite the delayed PC version, and that’s pretty poor for a flagship Sony game. If this is what PlayStation calculated, then the console maker may simply not have wanted to finance another crazy Kojima project.
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But what I’m skeptical about is the notion that this is actually the end. Instead, this appears more like a way of securing Kojima’s freedom of expression. In fact, he has been testing different publishers for about three months after June and chose the one who was ready to give him the chance to work on such a crazy tonal game as OD, Kojima’s horror project with Jordan Peele. Moreover, the deal of Xbox and Kojima Productions involves not only games but also film and TV content, which seems quite natural for a publisher, which promised to develop its physint in a transmedia way.
However, there is something ironic in everything that is happening right now: Xbox cuts deeply into its first-party studios and, at the same time, always finds its place when it comes to the game creators who need to be free of control. Sony, on the contrary, loves Kojima, but is able to stop him anytime. The lesson that this industry needs to learn is not about PlayStation and Xbox as hardware manufacturers but about a publisher who gives enough freedom for an auteur.
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