Update #2 (): Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier has now weighed in on this.
While neither confirming nor denying Chris Dring’s reporting in The Game Business, reading between the lines it appears that Hideo Kojima might have wanted $400 million for Physint from Sony.
According to Schreier, a source at Xbox told him that Microsoft was paying “significantly less” than that.
Here’s what he wrote on ResetEra:
“I hesitate to give exact numbers without consulting the literature or corroborating them with multiple first-hand sources, as always.
And there are a lot of different numbers here. There’s the number Physint was originally signed for at PlayStation, the number he was approaching, the number that was brought up during negotiations, the number he would have been with some A-list actors attached, the number Xbox agreed to, and the number it will actually cost by the time it releases.
That said, someone at Xbox with direct knowledge of the deal told me that they signed Physint for much less than that.
We’ll probably never get a definitive answer on this, but I think the takeaway is that Physint was going to cost Sony a lot of money. plot of money without any promise of exclusivity or IP ownership.
Microsoft’s version of the game could have a significantly lower budget than initially planned.
Update #1 ():
Earlier this week, Jason Schreier alluded to rumors regarding the budget for Hideo Kojima’s Physint, which Sony ultimately decided to cancel.
A report from The Game Business claims that new publisher Xbox paid around $400 million for the game, which is at the high end of AAA game development costs.
Titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, for example – developed by Insomniac in the US – cost around $300 million. This does, however, include significant licensing fees for Disney.
Schreier suggested that Microsoft could actually pay less for Physint that Kojima did not ask Sony, so it is possible that he asked even more money from the Japanese giant. It is, however, unclear whether this also includes all cross-media aspects.
As a reminder, Kojima insisted on temporal exclusivity and full ownership of intellectual property, despite these strong budgetary demands.
If that’s true, I can understand why Sony walked away.
Original story: It appears that Hideo Kojima was demanding a significant amount of money from Sony to make the stealth action game Physint – although he retains ownership of its intellectual property and intends to release it on multiple platforms.
PlayStation announced earlier this month that it had pulled out of the project, first announced in 2024.
Xbox has since picked up the game, which will star Bill Skarsgard in the lead role. Development is still in its early stages, with Kojima unsure which engine to use now that Guerrilla’s exclusive Decima appears to be out of the equation.
The game has since been picked up by Xbox, which was seen as a big PR win among gamers.
But reporting from Bloomberg reliable Jason Schreier suggests Sony was concerned about the project’s progress, its cost and Kojima’s reluctance to commit to exclusivity under the circumstances.
Schreier also said that key PlayStation executives who signed the original deal, like Jim Ryan, have since retired.
Kojima Productions pushed back on these claims in a statement last week, encouraging fans to approach them with a “dose of skepticism.”
In a new video, Schreier claims that negotiations between Sony and the Japanese studio had been going on for months, with the focus on “the future of the project, on the budget of the project, on the schedule, on expansions, on exclusivity, and ultimately it did not lead to a satisfactory result.”
The journalist added:
“By the way, when I was in Japan, several people came up to me while I was at the Tokyo Game Show and at various TGS parties and said, ‘Did you hear how much Kojima was charging (to make) Physint?’ I didn’t confirm the rumored figure, but it was pretty significant.
That said, that doesn’t mean Xbox was willing to pay that much, and in fact I think Xbox is paying less than Kojima was asking PlayStation for.
These are all interesting insights from Schreier that help contextualize and justify Sony’s decision here.
While the optics were undoubtedly bad for PlayStation, it seemed like Physint was going to be an extremely expensive endeavor – especially considering that the platform holder wouldn’t own anything and the game would be free to release elsewhere after a period of timed exclusivity on the console.
This doesn’t seem like a good deal for Sony, regardless of Kojima’s influence.
Gn tech
