Sony Interactive Entertainment has dropped out of Physint, the action-espionage game it announced with Hideo Kojima’s studio in 2024, and the reasons seem to have leaked.
According to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with nonpublic details of the project, PlayStation backed out for a mix of reasons: Physint had already missed development deadlines, it was on track to run well over budget, and it was still years away from release.
Finishing it could have required an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. Sony was reportedly unwilling to spend that kind of money on a game that wouldn’t stay permanently exclusive to PlayStation hardware.
There was another problem. The report says the two Death Stranding games failed to meet PlayStation’s revenue expectations.
Missing an internal revenue target isn’t the same as losing money. The report doesn’t include budgets, sales figures, or profit numbers for either game, so there is no basis to call them flops.
Who owns what
Kojima Productions isn’t a first-party studio. It has been independent since Kojima’s messy split from Konami in 2015, and it reportedly kept ownership of the IP tied to its games rather than handing it to Sony.
Both Death Stranding titles were timed PlayStation exclusives before arriving on PC and other platforms. So Sony would have been financing an extremely expensive game it wouldn’t own and couldn’t keep locked to its consoles forever.
Physint was introduced during a State of Play as a new IP, not a Metal Gear game, as Konami still owns that franchise. Kojima pitched it as a return to espionage with a heavy cinematic angle, with Sony Pictures name-dropped as part of the wider ambition. It was announced before entering full production, with serious work only expected after Death Stranding 2.
According to Hideo Kojima, the project is continuing with new backing associated with Microsoft and Xbox.
