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Hideo Kojima Says Sony Canceled Physint Over A Zoom Call And Claims He Still Doesn’t Know The Reason Why
Hideo KojimaKojima ProductionsPhysintPlayStationSonyXbox
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.
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.