This week, Sony stunned the gaming public when it announced it would no longer collaborate with Hideo Kojima on his upcoming game, Physint . Instead, the game would go to Xbox, but immediately, Kojima said this was all happening because Sony said it would cancel Physint .

Reporting emerged from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier that this was largely due to Physint missing deadlines and being over budget, in addition to not even being PlayStation exclusive when all was said and done. Schreier, in a new video, went on to say that Sony is now doing a more “rigorous” system of checks and milestones its games have to meet. This, he says, is a direct result of the historic flop of Concord .

It remains unclear how or why Sony positioned Concord as its next big IP, going so far as to map out lore ages in advance for future development and even produce an animated short film that aired on Amazon. Sony seemed to genuinely believe it was a key part of its future and its spearhead for its new live-service push.

As soon as Concord was revealed, there was nothing to indicate that would happen. Every showcase of Concord was viewed negatively by the majority of the gaming audience, and things reached the point where even a free test of the game barely cracked a few thousand concurrent players on Steam. For actual launch? That figure did not get above 700. The plug was pulled on the game in two weeks, ending a project that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and years upon years of development. Its studio, Firewalk, was dismantled shortly after.

The idea here is that Sony weighed its options for Physint and decided that it may end up burning too much cash for an underwhelming result. Of course, the resulting PR hit for the separation, and Kojima being so blunt about the reason why, has been devastating. The public is citing how much money Sony has tossed into the void on failed or cancelled live-service games, but they won’t give an auteur like Kojima a new release.

Cost-cutting has happened in other ways, with Sony ending updates on Destiny 2 due to its supposed costs, deeply angering what was still Sony’s largest playerbase in the genre it was trying to pursue (and Destiny 2 is still its most-played first-party live game three months after service ended). It is seemingly why other projects like Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Factions was cancelled as well. Now, however, Sony just released a very expensive Wolverine game that is not reviewing great, though whether that actually flops remains to be seen.

It is obviously a good idea to be more rigorous about the games you’re releasing to make sure they’re not going to arrive with a very expensive thud, but this is having some significant effects on projects and games that fans actually wanted to see, while Sony keeps producing things they don’t care about, especially live games. God of War: Laufey and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet are meant to get Sony back in gear, but the latter especially has been an enormously expensive and time-consuming project, so it will have to blow minds and drown in sales to make up for that. We’ll see if it can.

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