Physint: Kojima breaks his silence on PlayStation's exit

In June, Sony Interactive Entertainment asked Hideo Kojima to join a Zoom call. The Kojima Productions founder took studio president Shinji Hirano and head of talent development Aki Saito with him, and came away with the news that PlayStation would no longer fund Physint, the action-espionage game he had been building as a spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid.

“I was shocked and I said, ‘What did you say?’ I couldn’t quite process what they had said,” Kojima tells IGN, in his first interview since the split became public last week. “I didn’t have any anger or sadness; my first thought was, ‘What am I going to do with my studio?’”

What losing the contract meant

Kojima Productions is an independent studio that survives contract by contract. With only two projects running - OD with Xbox and Physint with PlayStation - losing one meant losing the money that pays the people on it. Kojima says he initially kept the news from his staff while he worked out whether the Physint team would have to go, and what the bank that helped the studio expand after Death Stranding would make of it. Actors had already been scanned for the game. One question sat over all of it: whether this was P.T. again.

“I didn’t want to do the same thing we did for P.T.,” he says.

The pitch that moved *Physint* to Xbox

Kojima says he took the project to Microsoft, and that new Xbox boss Asha Sharma moved quickly to pick it up, turning a game that began life as a PlayStation project into an Xbox-published one. Whether Physint still arrives on PlayStation at all is now an open question; nothing has been announced either way.

The interview was recorded before Bloomberg reported that Sony walked away over missed deadlines, budget concerns and Death Stranding’s commercial performance. Kojima does not confirm that account, saying only that the studio did not understand the reason it was given.

Asked to comment, Kojima Productions gave IGN a statement saying the studio is “in a healthy, profitable state, development for Physint continues to move forward with Xbox, and our relationship with PlayStation remains strong.”

Our opinion

The interesting thing here is not the console politics but the arithmetic Kojima lays out: two contracts, one payroll, and a single meeting that could have taken the whole studio down. He is candid about the parts most executives sand off - blanking in the call, hiding it from his own team, worrying about the bank - and that candour is a better answer to “why Xbox?” than any press release. It also sets the honest expectation for what happens next. A rescue is not a schedule: the pitch bought Physint a future, not a release date, and the project still has to prove it can survive the same scrutiny that ended its PlayStation run.