Just when you think it cannot get any worse for PlayStation this generation, it somehow does.
Studio closures, layoffs, game cancelations, all-time flop releases, the announcement of intent to end physical media, and now the fumbling of a legend. Last night, news broke that PlayStation Studios was aiming to cancel Hideo Kojima’s PHYSINT project earlier this year, and so it has now moved on to Xbox. Kojima himself confirmed it.
“PHYSINT is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions,” Kojima said in a statement that’s racked up almost 19 million views in under 12 hours. “Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner. In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in Xbox a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again. Please rest assured that development of PHYSINT, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward.”
PlayStation’s statement on the subject, meanwhile, painted a much different picture with a passive tone that now ends up coming off as tone deaf, yet again.
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions on its project PHYSINT,” Sony said. “We continue to have great admiration for Hideo Kojima’s vision for the game. Our relationship remains strong after three decades of industry-leading, genre-defining creative cooperation, and we look forward to continued close collaboration with Hideo Kojima and his award-winning independent studio in the future.”
Clearly, there’s more going on behind the scenes here that we do not know. For PlayStation to want to cancel a game like this and potentially ruin a relationship with a creator like Kojima, the powers-that-be in their suits must have thought that it wasn’t worth the money, and PlayStation would have been footing the bill for most of it as the game’s publisher. However expensive PHYSINT is shaping up to be, PlayStation must feel like the return on investment is not worth it.
But this goes beyond that. This is Hideo Kojima, and PHYSINT is meant to be a stealth action game that’s a spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid. Death Stranding was way more of a gamble with its complex plot and weirdness. This project feels like in theory to be more of a sure thing, and yet for Sony, it wasn’t. This is more bad PR on top of a pile of bad PR that the PS5 generation has been sacked with, and yet they still went through with it. Does it really all boil down to money? Probably, but it still feels like another misfire from Sony.
Enter Xbox to snatch up both Kojima and his projects. Expanding on the partnership that will begin with Kojima’s horror title OD, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma jumped at the opportunity to add another of his games to its stable.
“Creators have choices about where and how they bring their ideas to life,” Sharma said. “We’re honored that Kojima-san has chosen Xbox to work with Kojima Productions on PHYSINT. His ambition to challenge conventions reflects the kind of creativity we want to support at Xbox.”
For now, it’s unclear if OD or PHYSINT will even be available on PlayStation whenever they release. As publisher, Xbox could prevent that from happening, but I don’t know if it will. Beyond a handful of upcoming titles, the company seems like it feels it’s worth it to remain multiplatform to keep PS5’s big install base in the ecosystem.
OD and PHYSINT are just the beginning, though. As part of the partnership, Xbox says that it will be “collaborating across film and television to bring new stories to broader audiences” alongside Kojima, meaning that this has the potential to grow bigger, longer, and more lucrative than anyone initially anticipated.
And really, PlayStation has no one to blame but itself for how things have gone so utterly awry this generation.
