Kojima Says He Still Loves Sony After Physint Snub
Hideo Kojima has responded to claims that budget and profitability worries pushed Sony out of Physint, insisting his affection for the company survives the split. Xbox now publishes the game instead.
There is a particular grace required to profess affection for a company that has just quietly closed a door on you, and Hideo Kojima appears to possess it in abundance. According to Eurogamer, Kojima has responded to accusations that his studio's action espionage project, Physint, ran over budget and missed deadlines, and he has done so not with the aggrieved silence one might expect but by insisting he still "loves Sony," even as Xbox now handles the publishing duties for a game that was, until recently, understood to be PlayStation's alone.
The accusations themselves stem from a report Eurogamer says has surfaced since Sony's exit was confirmed last week, one alleging that the decision to step away came down to concerns over budget, potential profitability, and exclusivity. This site previously covered a related claim from Bloomberg that Sony axed Kojima's Physint over budget and sales projections, and the two accounts point in the same direction: a studio spending like it still had something to prove, and a publisher no longer convinced the arithmetic would work out in its favor.
What strikes me is not the accusation itself, studios run over budget constantly and prestige work has never been cheap, but the tenor of Kojima's reply. He has not, by Eurogamer's account, disputed the numbers or staged a public grievance against the company that walked away from a PlayStation-exclusive deal. He has simply said he still loves the platform holder that dropped him, which is either remarkable loyalty or remarkable professional discipline, and possibly both at once. One does not typically see that kind of restraint from a creator whose flagship project was reportedly deemed insufficiently profitable to keep in-house.
As for Xbox, inheriting a game that Sony judged too expensive to gamble on is not quite the coup it might be dressed up as; it is, more precisely, catching what the house with the better track record for backing this kind of ambitious single-player work decided it could no longer justify funding. Whether Physint arrives as the game Kojima intended, or as a leaner, more compromised version of it, is a question that no amount of professed affection for Sony will answer. That will be settled, as these things always are, by what actually ships.