Kojima Productions has pushed back against a report claiming that Sony dropped Physint because of missed deadlines, rising costs, disappointing revenue and disagreements over exclusivity. However, despite describing the claims as “unsubstantiated speculation,” the studio hasn’t actually denied any of them.
As I covered earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that Sony had several reasons for withdrawing from Hideo Kojima’s next game. According to his sources, Physint had missed deadlines and was heading well over budget despite still being years away, while both Death Stranding games had failed to meet PlayStation’s revenue expectations.
Sony was also reportedly reluctant to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on another Kojima project that wouldn’t remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. At no point was any form of exclusivity publically stated, but it was assumed Physint would follow the same trajectory as Death Stranding: a year of exclusivity, followed by going multiplatform.
In a new statement published alongside interviews with The Washington Post and IGN, Kojima Productions pushed back against the reporting slightly.
“Normally, we would not comment on unsubstantiated speculation on the internet, but these aspersions around our relationship with PlayStation, the commercial performance of the DEATH STRANDING franchise, and the broader production planning and investment for PHYSINT, have reached beyond the studio and have touched our fans, our creative partners, and colleagues we have worked alongside with for three decades,” says the official statement.
“None of the claims written came from any official or on-the-record source and as such we encourage you to take them with a dose of scepticism.”
The wording is careful: take the claims with scepticism. But it also doesn’t actually deny any of Schreier’s claims. Obviously, unnamed sources are rather normal when reporting on the internal decisions of giant companies, especially when the people involved probably enjoy being employed and would quite like that to continue.
More importantly, the statement doesn’t say Schreier’s information is wrong. Kojima Productions instead reassures everyone that the studio is currently healthy and profitable, that Physint is continuing under Xbox and that its relationship with PlayStation remains strong. At no point in the statement does it actually say Schreier’s report is incorrect.
All of that can be true without contradicting Bloomberg’s report. A profitable Kojima Productions doesn’t mean the Death Stranding games reached Sony’s internal revenue targets. Likewise, Physint continuing under Xbox says nothing about whether it had missed deadlines or was running over budget while Sony was funding it.
Bloomberg reported that the Death Stranding games failed to meet PlayStation’s expectations. That doesn’t necessarily mean either game was an outright commercial failure or that Kojima Productions itself was losing money. A game can do very well, and still feel to meet expectations.
Schreier has since responded through his verified ResetEra account, saying there was nothing in the statement for him to answer because “there’s no denial here.”
He did, however, add another important detail: “Sony and Kojima Productions were in negotiations over the future of the game for a while before it was canceled.”
According to Schreier, Kojima Productions might be unhappy with how Sony ultimately handled the situation, but the cancellation didn’t come completely out of nowhere.
That slightly changes the impression created by the original announcements. Kojima may have been genuinely blindsided by Sony’s final decision, but his company seemingly knew there were questions hanging over the project and had been negotiating with Sony about its future.
Kojima himself the Washington Post that the cancellation was delivered during a Zoom call in June. Sony reportedly told him it could no longer fund development, but didn’t provide a reason for the decision. Kojima says he believed Physint was safe and was so shocked that his immediate concern was the survival of his company.
“We’re an independent studio,” he told The Washington Post. “That means if they can’t fund us, our studio could collapse.”
Kojima Productions employs nearly 200 people and had already hired specifically for Physint. Thankfully, nobody was laid off – well, not yet, anyway. Some employees were temporarily moved onto OD, Kojima’s other Xbox project, while a smaller group continued working on Physint as the company searched for another publisher.
Physint was previously expected to use an upgraded version of Sony-owned Guerrilla Games’ Decima engine. With Sony pulling out, that may no longer be the plan: Kojima says the studio is currently experimenting with different engines, while Epic Games and MetaHuman copyright notices on the project’s latest artwork have prompted speculation about a move to Unreal Engine.
It makes perfect sense that Sony abandoning Physint would mean Decima is no longer an option, The real question is how much this would hurt production: if the team was already using Decima, then it now has extra work to do. If the game wasn’t even at the point where an engine had been decided on, then the Decima withdrawal is less of a proble.
And the second option seems the most likely. Gene Park of the Washington Post wrote: “Kojima said he has written out the plot and game concept for Physint, complete with storyboards, and the studio has started to create 3D models, along with scanning its cast of actors, including just-announced star Bill Skarsgard. Kojima said he’s currently experimenting with various engines but nothing is set in stone.”
That suggests Physint is still in very early production.
Kojima says he approached several potential partners before striking a deal with Microsoft, helped by the existing relationship between the two companies. Most of the studio apparently didn’t learn about the new Xbox deal until the day before it was announced publicly, potentially indicating how quickly it came together, or that Kojima didn’t want it to leak.
It’s also unclear if Physint will be released on PlayStation, because the decision is apparently up to Xbox. When asked directly, Kojima said, “I don’t know the answer to that – that would be a question for Xbox. But I don’t know for sure.”
So there we have it. We probably won’t know what actually went down until a good few years down the line, if ever.
WGB 