It’s been kind of a wild week for news, but one of the more questionable pieces that broke was Kojima Productions revealing that PlayStation is no longer supporting upcoming game, Physint and try to cancel the project in mid-June before Xbox swooped in to continue funding as publisher of Kojima’s next espionage game. Now, we have a reason, and it’s not too shocking, as Bloomberg has reported that Sony reason from dropping the game is due to budget, hitting deadlines, potential profitability and exclusivity, says people familiar with the situation.
When it comes to profitability, the report reveals that both Death Stranding games actually did not meet PlayStation’s revenue expectations. When it came Physint, there came a question of how the project would perform commercially when looking at how Kojima’s past PlayStation published games did.
There was also the factor of deadlines to the story, as Physint had already missed deadlines and that Sony was tracking Physint to be over budget, plus investing so much into a game that’s only a timed exclusive with an IP that Kojima’s studio owned and would later come to other platforms wasn’t a big sell to keep Physint around. One of those platforms being PC, which Sony has divested from this year after not seeing the return it wanted from the handful of first party releases that it dropped on the platform.
When Kojima Productions was first brought in to PlayStation as a partner in late 2015 in announced in a video featuring Kojima and Sony executive Andrew House, it was during a time when the brand felt more creatively friendly to developers. Now much has changed as those familiar executives have come and go, including House, as the brand feels almost unrecognizable with who is in charge as Sony’s approach feels much more business focus to PlayStation and other brands like Crunchyroll than ever before as the company milks more money from it current user base rather than trying to bring new ones into its ecosystem.
For those looking at the numbers at the top of Sony, it was probably an easier decision to pull funding from Physint. What is Sony’s loss was Microsoft’s gain, a morally bankrupt company in need of an easy PR win after laying off 1,600 employees back in July with more to be cut later on in its fiscal year and cutting five studios from its roster of internal developers across Xbox, Bethesda, and Activision-Blizzard brands. In a statement to Bloomberg said that Betting on Kojima-san is an easy call” and that “we believe in his team’s ability to build AAA games with groundbreaking, new IP and we believe in OD, Physint, and our growing partnership.”
