Xbox's Kojima Deal Gets Cheaper With Every New Report
The number attached to Hideo Kojima's Physint keeps shrinking as reporters walk back their own speculation, and the new figure says a great deal about what Xbox actually bought.
That Xbox underpaid for prestige is, by now, the only part of this story everyone has settled on; what nobody agrees on is by how much, and watching the number shrink in real time tells you more about how a rumor calcifies into received wisdom than it does about Hideo Kojima's spy thriller itself.
The figure started, as these figures tend to, as a guess. Chris Dring of The Game Business floated $400 million as what Physint cost at Sony before the publisher walked away, and the internet, predictably, treated a guess as a ledger entry. Dring has since clarified, as GameSpot reports, that he was speculating, and that what he now understands is that Xbox is paying "far, far less," possibly under $200 million. Windows Central's Jez Corden, discussing the deal on the Destin channel, says sources with direct knowledge of the contracts describe the real figure as a mere fraction of the original number. The New York Times, for its part, has only committed to calling the deal "substantially below" what Xbox would typically spend on a premium production, a sentence that is scrupulously honest and tells you almost nothing, since no studio on earth publishes its typical rate.
What remains unconfirmed, and ought to stay labeled that way regardless of how many outlets now repeat it, is the $400 million Sony figure that started this entire exercise. It was also reported, separately, that budget overruns and delays were among the reasons Sony terminated the arrangement over a video call, which is its own kind of unkind footnote given that Kojima's previous collaboration with the publisher, Death Stranding, reportedly barely broke even. One wonders what a studio has to deliver before caution stops looking like prudence and starts looking like nerve.
The Xbox agreement, whatever its true size, covers film and television rights as well as the game, with Bill Skarsgård attached to star alongside Charlee Fraser, Don Lee, and Minami Hamabe, though Physint still has no release date and no footage to its name. Kojima has said the project grew out of fan demand for another Metal Gear, a series he no longer has access to, and that he considers Physint his best shot yet at commercial success. New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, meanwhile, addressed the platform's relationship with Sony directly, saying the two companies currently collaborate and that this will continue under her leadership: "Competition and collaboration can coexist."
Perhaps. But a company that spent years promising prestige exclusives of its own and delivered mostly reorganizations has now apparently bought one secondhand, at a discount, from the publisher that gave up on it. That is not a rivalry. That is a clearance sale.