Sony may have pulled out of funding Hideo Kojima’s new spy game Physint, according to reports, for some very interesting reasons. According to Bloomberg, these reasons were a growing budget, missed development deadlines and doubts about the project’s commercial success.
Sources say Sony is also dissatisfied with the financial performance of Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2. Both games received high praise from critics but, according to the company, did not bring in the revenue expected. Against this backdrop, investing in another expensive island project seems too risky.
Another issue is that Physint won’t only be released on PlayStation. Sony doesn’t want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a game that doesn’t provide exclusivity for its console ecosystem. However, the project is reportedly over budget and behind schedule, despite being still years away from release.
As we reported yesterday, the game was taken over by Microsoft after Sony left. Xbox became interested in Physint because of its potential release on PC, as well as the prospect of being adapted into movies and television. The rights belong to Kojima Productions, which is in line with Microsoft’s strategy of developing game franchises in other formats.
Incidentally, Kojima has also been stripped of access to the Decima engine, which is owned by Sony’s in-house studio, so from now on all Kojima Productions projects will be produced on UE5 and possibly other third-party engines.
