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In a slate of announcements from Sony Interactive Entertainment, Hideo Kojima and Xbox, we got confirmation that the upcoming action game Physint is now in development with Xbox, as Sony have decided to abandon the project entirely, pulling funding and publishing support, and the rug out from under Hideo Kojima's feet, metaphorically speaking.
The reaction to this has mostly landed in the same place: why would Sony walk away from something this ambitious? It's Hideo Kojima; it's his next big IP, a spiritual successor to the legendary Metal Gear series. Why would a video game production powerhouse like Sony walk away from such an exclusive title?
I think the answer is less about Physint's state right now, regardless of what it is, and more about what it actually costs to make, what Kojima's last game did commercially, and what Sony and Xbox each need right now.
Production values this high cost more than money can always justify
Knowing Hideo Kojima, Physint is aiming for the highest possible production values, and that almost certainly means Death Stranding levels of cinematic ambition, high-fidelity performance capture, and painstaking graphical work. Graphics and cinematics are the two things that eat the most development time on any project like this, and time is money, especially with a development cycle that will run several years. If the game is still relatively early in development and not yet built around next-gen hardware targets, that's an even bigger bill still to come, not one already paid off.
Then there's the engine problem. It's safe to assume that Kojima was using Guerrilla's Decima engine, which powered Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2. But Decima is Sony's property, which means Kojima Productions will have to switch to Unreal Engine 5 to continue the project. This switch will take time; porting assets and everything else into a brand new engine isn't done by a simple press of a button.
Sony have actual sales data on what a Kojima game does commercially
It would be disingenuous to call the Death Stranding series a flop, but it is not a blockbuster seller either, and it's the clearest precedent Sony have for how a genuinely strange, hard-to-market Kojima concept performs at retail. It's not a classic action-adventure, and it never tried to be. Kojima never catered to mass audiences.
If Sony is looking at Physint through the lens of Death Stranding's sales performance, a huge production-value spend on another hard-to-categorise game starts to look like a genuinely difficult bet to justify, especially when that budget could be spread across several more conventional projects instead.
On top of that, SIE already wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on the likes of Concord, The Last of Us 2 multiplayer game, Bend Studio's live service project and others. Add a struggling Marathon to the mix, and you get a pretty expensive picture.
Kojima's OD already proved how hard a sell his concepts can be
Physint's tone is set to raise some eyebrows; there's no question about it. Hideo Kojima's games have become increasingly harder to sell, especially to executives whose first question is "How much money is this going to make us?".
It's a pattern Kojima has openly confirmed. Speaking about OD, his horror project also published by Xbox, Kojima said he pitched the concept to "many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies," and that "all of them said the same thing," calling him crazy and saying they didn't understand the concept or believe they could execute it. Only Xbox, through then-CEO Phil Spencer, said yes. If Physint is similarly unconventional, and everything about its brief, cryptic teaser suggests it might be, Sony may simply have reached the same conclusion every other publisher reached on OD.
For Xbox, the calculation is almost the opposite
Everything that makes Physint a risk for Sony makes it an opportunity for Xbox. It's that simple. It's been bad news after bad news for Xbox recently- Series X|S consoles don't sell, Game Pass growth has stagnated, five studios divested, projects canned and thousands of layoffs. It's hardly a pleasant situation to find yourself in.
Xbox needs as many wins as it can get right now, and a relevant, critically respected developer working in a genre with obvious commercial upside is about as easy a story to hype as exists in the industry.
Even if Physint never becomes a selling blockbuster in the traditional sense, there's a real possibility it becomes the start of a new exclusive franchise under the Xbox banner, something the platform can point to as a system seller as we head towards the next-gen.
Sony can afford to pass on that kind of gamble because it already has plenty of established franchises to lean on. Xbox, in its current position, arguably can't afford not to take it, and its willingness to back OD when nobody else would suggests this is a clear pattern showing Xbox's long-term thinking.
