September has been quite a month so far for Sony’s entertainment services division—and, one imagines, for that division’s PR staff. Last week we discussed Sony’s decision to engender goodwill in its customer base by, um, keeping every penny of the $500m the company is set to receive in tariff refunds. That customer base was already annoyed by Sony’s discontinuation of physical media, and the hits just keep coming, because Sony has also managed to misplace its single most famous game creator.
When I think of PlayStation, two things come to mind. The first is annoyingly console-exclusive games like Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy VII, Bloodborne, Horizon Zero Dawn, and The Last of Us. And the second is Hideo Kojima.
Kojima’s games have been PlayStation releases for as long as the PlayStation has been a thing. Metal Gear Solid was released for the original PlayStation in 1998, four years after the console hit stores, and it’s wild to compare that game to the earliest PS1 releases to see what Kojima and his relatively small team were able to do with the device’s limited hardware. For the better part of the next 20 years, the series and the console evolved in tandem, with new instalments arriving to leverage each new generation’s expanded capabilities.
Then in 2015, Kojima left Konami, the developer with whom he’d spent his entire career. The divorce was controversial, and the details are well-documented; what’s relevant here is that it all hinged on Konami’s decision to pivot away from the sort of narrative-heavy games in which Kojima specialized. Kojima responded by leaving and taking his own Kojima Productions with him.
Sony was only too happy to continue its relationship with Kojima, working with him to produce Death Stranding and its sequel, and all seemed cosy between director and publisher. Until this week.
Since the completion of Death Stranding 2, Kojima and co. have been working on a project called PHYSINT, which reportedly features similar stealth-based gameplay to the Metal Gear Solid series. Sharp-eyed Instagram followers of the director might have noticed he’s been spending a lot of time in the US over the last few months, and this week we just learned why: PHYSINT won’t be developed in collaboration with Sony.
This time, it wasn’t Kojima who walked away; as per Kojima himself, Sony cancelled its participation in the PHYSINT project in June. Since then, Kojima says, “Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner.” They found one: XBOX, which Kojima describes as “a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future,” a description that certainly seems to come with an implied “unlike Sony.”
For its part, XBOX certainly appears confident that it’s in business with Kojima for the long haul. In the official joint statement announcing the partnership, XBOX CEO Asha Sharma says, “[Kojima’s] ambition to challenge conventions reflects the kind of creativity we want to support at XBOX.” The relationship will also extend beyond this game—and their shared love of inexplicable capitalization—with “XBOX and KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS collaborating across film and television to bring new stories to broader audiences.”
Given the long and previously harmonious relationship between Sony and Kojima, along with his own description of the decision to cancel PHYSINT as “unexpected”, it’s hard to think of any other reason behind the split than brass tacks. Death Stranding 2 seems to have sold less than its predecessor, and perhaps Sony simply decided that funding another Kojima project wasn’t a great business decision.
But neither is jettisoning one of gaming’s most respected directors, one whose name was basically synonymous with both your company and your console, and watching him walk straight to your great rivals—especially when that comes on top of a year in which you’ve apparently gone out of your way to annoy your customers. So spare a thought for Sony’s PR staff, who have another long few days ahead of them.
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