On Thursday, Sony announced that it was parting ways with game director Hideo Kojima and the parties would no longer collaborate on Physint , his upcoming game. Right away, it was announced that he would instead take the game to Xbox, where he was already developing a separate title, OD .

Then, however, Kojima took to Twitter to say this happened because Sony was going to cancel Physint and he simply did not want that to happen. The entire thing was a PR disaster for Sony, about its fourth in as many months, and was followed up by underwhelming reviews for its big new game, Wolverine , within hours.

It is clearly a PR loss for Sony and gain for Xbox, but the reality of the situation is at least somewhat complicated. A new report from Jason Schreier at Bloomberg digs into what was going on with Physint at Sony and why this happened.

  • Many PlayStation executives with longstanding relationships with Kojima, whose partnership with Sony goes back decades, are no longer with the company.
  • Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2 did not meet Sony’s expectations. The two games are estimated to have sold 5 million and 2.5 million copies, respectively, by last count.
  • Physint missed multiple deadlines and was already well over budget, despite remaining years away.
  • Physint was not going to be a permanent exclusive to PlayStation hardware, similar to Death Stranding being a timed exclusive that eventually went elsewhere. Kojima Productions owns the franchise itself.

In one sense, you can certainly see how many of these reasons would alarm an already wobbling Sony, which has produced relatively few big first-party hits this generation and would be wary of sinking enormous amounts of cash into a future Kojima game given everything listed above.

That said, the counter to that is that Sony was willing to burn hundreds of millions of dollars and many years chasing live-service games while they would not give a Hideo Kojima project the same attention.

And if this is such a bad bet, why would Xbox be so eager to swoop down and grab it, now having two Kojima projects on deck? You could argue that Xbox isn’t exactly the best financial steward either (would this launch on Game Pass? What would that do to sales?), but new CEO Asha Sharma is trying to increase profitability and growth, and if this was simply shredding cash, that would go counter to that. So that is not likely how Xbox views the situation. It isn’t going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a temporary PR win.

This may help Sony’s pocketbook, but it does not help public perception of the company, which continues to make perceived fumble after fumble over the last few months and years. Though again, with Kojima’s production timelines, it may be many, many years until we see how this is sorted out in the end.

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