Sony is making some strange decisions.
As you might have heard, Sony officially dropped Hideo Kojima and his studio after unexpectedly asking him to cancel his upcoming game PHYSINT. That title is, apparently, a spiritual successor to Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series and a personal project of his, which eventually led him to partner up with XBOX to keep it from certain doom.
And now we know why Sony decided to do so (and no, it wasn’t just because the name PHYSINT is close to PHYSIcal media). According to a Bloomberg report, it was “budget concerns” that primarily drove Sony toward giving up on Kojima Productions, despite previous long-term cooperation with the studio on games like Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.
Those two games apparently did not earn too much money, especially considering significant sales on PC, where Sony takes a noticeably smaller cut. They weren’t money sinks at any rate and weren’t necessarily a loss on either Kojima’s or Sony’s part, but margins are the name of the game in 2026, and Sony seems to not have liked how big (or, rather, small) they were for the Death Stranding duology.
Due to prolonged failures and problems with staying profitable, Sony also seems to have become much stricter on its production, which, as Bloomberg reports, led to many cancellations. These same tighter production schedules may have impacted Kojima’s standing due to how long his games usually spend in development (DS2 came seven years after the first; Metal Gear Solid 5 was equally distant from its predecessor MGS4: Guns of the Patriots).
But it’s Sony’s own decisions that have led to this, rather than Kojima’s unpredictable profit margins.
By digging its own hole through chasing megalomaniacal live-service projects, Sony has lost untold amounts of money, with reports suggesting Concord alone may have cost the company over $200 million in total. Other live-service games and projects led even to studio closures, such as Bluepoint, which was set to make a live-service title instead of focusing on the tried-and-true remake strategy and then eventually closed down.
Furthermore, Bloomberg reports that, since Sony exited the PC market by stopping singleplayer releases on the platform, Kojima’s self-published PC releases would not earn Sony a single penny. So not only did Sony create an environment for austerity by obsessing over live services, it locked itself out of profits on secondary platforms.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/sony-kojima-split-reasons/
