The gaming industry continues to discuss news that Hideo Kojima will move his game PHYSINT from Playstation to Xbox. There have been official statements from all parties, but no one has specified why Sony decided to abandon the project. Playstation said it was a “difficult decision”, while Kojima Productions said the game may be canceled if it can’t reach a deal with Xbox.
Alinea Analytics Analyst Rhys Elliott believeSony may refuse to fund PHYSINT due to insufficient returns from cooperation with Hideo Kojima. He looked at the results of Kojima Productions’ past two projects created with funding from Sony and concluded that PlayStation might not be satisfied with profits.
According to Alinea Analytics, the Death Stranding 2: Beach game, released last summer, has now sold around 2.5 million copies, including 1.8 million copies on the Playstation 5 and 700,000 copies on Steam. The project was released after 10 months of being exclusive to Sony consoles. The game’s total revenue is expected to be approximately $170 million. On Playstation, sales were around 1 million copies in the first 2 months, with sales declining significantly thereafter. In total, the platform brought in approximately $129 million in revenue, 65% of which came from the first 2 months.
By comparison, the original Death Stranding sold approximately 5 million copies and generated approximately $243 million in revenue during the same period of its lifespan. Elliott estimates the combined revenue from the two projects will be about $413 million. At the same time, according to his calculations, the production cost of the first part is about 100 million US dollars, and the production cost of the second part may be 150-200 million US dollars. Taking into account marketing and other expenses, the series may pay for itself, but the actual profit is likely to be relatively small.
Let us remind you that PHYSINT is pitched as Hideo Kojima’s return to the espionage action genre. The game designer himself gained a huge reputation with KONAMI’s Metal Gear Solid series. Currently, PHYSINT has no release date and gameplay has never been shown off. There is no information on a possible release for this project on Game Pass.
