Sony dropped Kojima's Physint, Xbox picked it up - what that means for PS5 owners here

Walk into any electronics shop here or scroll through the second-hand listings, and the picture is the same as it's been for a decade: PlayStation everywhere, Xbox as the occasional curiosity. That's why the news that Hideo Kojima's Physint - announced in 2024 as a PlayStation project - is now being published by Xbox lands differently in our region than it does in the US.

First, what actually happened. PlayStation says it "stepped away" from working with Kojima Productions on Physint earlier this year, and doesn't say why. Kojima's version is less diplomatic: he says PlayStation Studios unexpectedly notified him in mid-June that the project was being cancelled. Stepping away and cancelling aren't the same thing, and I'd bet the second one is closer to the truth.

Microsoft then stepped in, and the deal reportedly doesn't stop at Physint. It also covers OD, the project Kojima was already making with Xbox, plus collaboration on film and TV. Xbox under Asha Sharma is reportedly treating Kojima as a central piece of its new direction.

Now the part that matters for players. No release date, no price and no platform plan have been announced. In other words, nobody knows yet whether Physint will be an Xbox exclusive. But look at how Microsoft has behaved lately: Forza Horizon 5 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle both ended up on PS5, and big first-party games keep landing on Sony's console. For a publisher that now needs to sell games rather than boxes, locking a Kojima title away from the console most people actually have under the TV would be a strange move.

The irony writes itself. The game Sony didn't want could still end up on PS5 - just with an Xbox logo on the splash screen.

For a player here, the maths is simple. If Physint comes to PC or Game Pass, you'll play it without buying new hardware. If it turns out to be a timed exclusive, buying an Xbox Series for one game is a tough sell, especially since second-hand Xbox games are far scarcer on local listings than PlayStation ones. And Physint was never close anyway - it has always been the project that comes after Kojima's other work, so there's nothing to panic about today.

The bigger story is what Sony is signalling: even a relationship it describes as three decades long doesn't guarantee a green light. If you've got a PS5, don't sell or buy anything. Just stop assuming that "Kojima" automatically means "PlayStation".

Image: Nicolas Richoffer / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hideo_Kojima_2008.jpg