Physint Report Reveals Why PlayStation Tried to Scrap Kojima’s Upcoming Game
A new report has shed light on why PlayStation tried to cancel Hideo Kojima’s upcoming stealth-action game, Physint. Earlier this week, Kojima Productions made waves when it announced that Physint would be shifting from PlayStation to Xbox as the game’s publisher. This move was primarily bewildering as this change was only made as a result of PlayStation trying to kill off the project entirely. Now, in the wake of this situation, further details have come to light that explain why PlayStation did this in the first place.
In a new report from Bloomberg, it was said that leadership at PlayStation was left disappointed by the sales of both Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2. This lack of commercial performance for Kojima’s latest games, when combined with the high budget for Physint, led to those in charge at PlayStation viewing the game as one that seemingly wasn’t a good financial investment.
Beyond this, the report also claims that Kojima Productions had already missed development deadlines for Physint, which was resulting in the game’s budget increasing further. PlayStation was also said to not be thrilled about the fact that Physint would seemingly come to other non-PlayStation platforms in the future as well, as Kojima Productions owns the rights to the IP and would be able to bring it to Xbox and PC with another publisher down the road if it chose to do so. This situation is one that has previously played out with Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2, with both titles simply being timed-exclusives for PlayStation hardware.
Although this reasoning makes some sense on PlayStation’s part, it still shows that the company has become much more focused on the financial performance of its games over everything else in recent years. This explains why PlayStation continues to pursue live-service games after repeated failures and also sheds light on why it opted to shut down a handful of its own studios throughout the course of the PS5 generation. While PlayStation used to publish plenty of games that it clearly didn’t expect to generate millions of unit sales, that era now seems to be very much in the past.
As for what Xbox now plans to do with Physint, the report claims that the company will bring the game to both its Xbox console (likely the upcoming Project Helix) and PC platforms. Since Kojima Productions retains the rights to the IP, it could feasibly also bring Physint to PS6 platforms in the future as well. However, as a result of this messy situation that has played out between PlayStation and Kojima Productions, Kojima himself might want to spurn a release for Physint on PS6 simply to spite those in charge at the company. For now, Physint remains without even a broad release window, as Kojima’s next game, the horror title OD, remains the primary focus of the studio.