It was a shock to fans when, earlier this month, PlayStation suddenly announced on X that it would no longer be publishing Physint. Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind the new spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid, says he was just as confused and surprised when Sony first delivered the news to him privately back in June. He says his mind immediately went blank and he still doesn’t know why the PS5 maker dropped his game.
“So in June, SIE said they wanted to have a Zoom call. I was so busy at that time–I had just gone to New York for a Prada event and then to LA right after,” he said in a new interview with IGN. “But anyway, I came back and we had this Zoom call. They said they can no longer fund development for Physint. I was shocked and I said, ‘What did you say?’ I couldn’t quite process what they had said. I wasn’t sure because I was in shock.”
Kojima Productions employs roughly 200 people, and the veteran game developer said he immediately started thinking about all of the implications of the deal falling through, including problems with bank loans and the need to potentially lay off tons of people who had been hired to work specifically on Physint, an espionage thriller that Kojima says will be a movie as well as a game.
He continued:
Nothing could’ve prepared me for their decision to step away from the project. So I thought, ‘What am I going to do from tomorrow?’ But from my side, I love Sony. And I don’t have any bad feelings against them because I know that it’s a tough time in the game industry.
I’ve been working with them for like 30 years… Mr. Ken Kutaragi, Mr. Hirai, I was close with them. But it’s not like that recently. I realized that, okay, this is the reality. It’s the 10th anniversary of my studio. My studio might collapse, right?
Kojima was in the call with Kojima Productions president Shinji Hirano and head of talent development Aki Saito, but wouldn’t say who was there on Sony’s side and whether it was PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst who delivered the news to him. The three kept the news to themselves at first. Kojima even said that the first thing he did after the meeting was go back and continue working on new pieces of the concept for Physint.
“The corporate structure of SIE is different from the Jim Ryan days,” he said. “But this was a project that we were both excited about and mutually agreed on. So because of that, the shock was even bigger in June.”
While Kojima Productions eventually landed a deal to continue making the game under Xbox, Kojima says he still doesn’t know why Sony made the sudden decision to abandon the project. “They haven’t contacted me ever since,” he said. “But I’m not fighting with Sony. We’re not in a dispute. But what I want to say is that we’ve been together for 30 years and we have this relationship. So if this was the conclusion, I would’ve wanted to hear it a little earlier. But that meeting in June, they just gave us the final notice.”
Bloomberg previously reported that part of the reasoning for Sony backing out of Physint had to do with it going over budget and missing deadlines. Death Stranding 2 also apparently didn’t sell as well as Sony hoped, and with the console maker backing away from PC, Physint would have to sell well only on PlayStation hardware to make up costs. A changing of the guard at Sony also reportedly played a role in the collaboration coming undone.
IGN‘s interview took place before Bloomberg’s report was published, but Kojima Productions has now responded to it in a new statement calling on people to take it with a “dose of skepticism,” and claiming that its relationship with Sony is still strong:
You may have seen a recent article that mentions Kojima Productions, speculating on the reasons for the change in publishing partners for Physint.
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.
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.
Make no mistake, this was a serious situation for the studio with a range of potentially significant implications. While we recognize that the article may have caused alarm, we want to reassure you all, for the record: that the studio is in a healthy, profitable state, development for Physint continues to move forward with Xbox, and our relationship with PlayStation remains strong.
Kojima reiterated the idea that there’s been no “divorce” with Sony in his interview. “I’ve always been a big Sony fan,” he said. “I’ve been using a Walkman. All my cameras are Sony. So I have no bad feelings towards them.”
