A Closer Look at PlayStation’s Messy Divorce With Hideo Kojima

On Thursday, PlayStation announced that it would be stepping away from Hideo Kojima’s upcoming title, PHYSINT. PlayStation and Kojima released competing press statements that paint vastly different versions of the divorce between the two entities. Now, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier’s reporting offers a closer look at what actually happened behind the scenes.

What We Need to Know

• After more than three decades of working with PlayStation through the Metal Gear Solid series, Kojima was insulated by several high-level executives within Sony. This safety net eroded over time as those executives began leaving the company.

• Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2 underperformed PlayStation’s expectations for the games. Collectively, both games have sold 5 million copies, or approximately 2.5 million copies per game.

• Kojima’s spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid, PHYSINT, has reportedly missed multiple deadlines set by PlayStation and is severely over budget.

• Another point of contention with PlayStation was that PHYSINT would be a timed console exclusive, similar to Death Stranding. Kojima would also retain complete ownership of the IP.
• This combination of issues with the production, lack of console exclusivity, and IP ownership lead to PlayStation parting ways with Hideo Kojima over the project.

Sony Keeps Taking Losses

This is yet another loss that PlayStation has taken over the last few months. The company has been embroiled in controversy after controversy. Starting with the announcement that it would end physical media support starting in spring 2028. This announcement was met with instantaneous and boisterous disapproval from gamers around the globe, as digital ownership of media has consistently been stripped away from gamers time and time again. This has led to the Stop Killing Games movement, which has championed physical media and digital ownership rights for consumers.

PlayStation is also dealing with the financial fallout from lackluster attempts at live-service video games. This includes failures such as Firewalk Studios’ Concord, the canceled The Last of Us multiplayer game, and a Horizon Zero Dawn title reportedly similar to Capcom’s Monster Hunter series. Alongside these projects is Bungie’s hero shooter Marathon, which is struggling to retain players.

Instead of PlayStation having Bungie develop Destiny 3, the company decided to back a losing horse with Marathon.

Over the past several months, PlayStation has eroded its goodwill within its gaming community and among its loyal console fans. Player sentiment is so strong that every Sony/PlayStation post or online event is bombarded with “No Disc, No Buy” comments or calls for Destiny 3.

During this time, PlayStation and its parent company have been relatively silent until Sony and PlayStation released a statement acknowledging that gamers do not own their digital games. This denial threw the gaming community into another firestorm, once again eroding its trust in the company.

The Bottom Line

PlayStation has once again shown a profound level of business incompetence that I have not seen in a long while. Either the company is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers, or its C-suite executives are trying to force gamers to accept this new paradigm shift within gaming.

Now, PlayStation is walking away from what could potentially be considered Kojima’s magnum opus with PHYSINT. From the mind of the man who helped birth the stealth-action genre and cinematic storytelling in games, the decision is baffling.

It seems like Sony is making some interesting moves to restructure its business and balance the heavy losses from its live-service nightmares. All this has done is alienate its consumer base and potentially undermine its long-term financial stability for investors.

From the outside looking in, the PlayStation ship appears to be rudderless. If PlayStation can get its act together, it will have to regain a significant amount of trust from its community. Only time will tell how PlayStation’s decisions play into the fate of the company and the next console generation.