Xbox Gains Rights to Publish Kojima Productions' Physint After PlayStation Cancels Game - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 09 September 2026 / 4,002 Views
Xbox has announced it has gained the rights to publish Kojima Productions' action espionage game, Physint. The game was originally announced to be published by PlayStation.
"Creators have choices about where and how they bring their ideas to life," said Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. "We’re honored that Kojima-san has chosen Xbox to work with Kojima Productions on Physint. His ambition to challenge conventions reflects the kind of creativity we want to support at Xbox."
Hideo Kojima added, "This expands our relationship with Xbox beyond OD. As we move forward with the development of Physint, we remain committed to redefining the action-espionage genre for players around the world."
Xbox and Kojima Productions have announced a relationship that will go beyond games and include film and television.
PlayStation in a post on social media has confirmed they will be stepping away from publishing Physint.
"An update from PlayStation Studios: After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions on its project Physint. We continue to have great admiration for Hideo Kojima's vision for the game.
"Our relationship remains strong after three decades of industry-leading, genre-defining creative cooperation, and we look forward to continued close collaboration with Hideo Kojima and his award-winning independent studio in the future."
Kojima in his own statement explained PlayStation would be cancelling Physint and after searching for three months has partnered with Xbox.
"As confirmed earlier through our official channels, in mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the Physint project," said Kojima. "Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions.
"Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner. In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in Xbox a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again. Please rest assured that development of Physint, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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WTF is wrong with Sony this gen?? For a company that supposedly having its most successful generation financially is suddenly acting like they're penny pinching and being greedy like crazy.
Death Standing 2 sold less than 2 million units on the PS5.
It also sold a few million on PC so Sony still making some money. But regardless, this is Kojima and its just a matter of time where he'll create something greater. Better to bet your money on him than their stupid LSG they keep wasting their money on. And what if this now causes a rift in the relationship between Sony and Kojima. Maybe next time Kojima has a banger game idea and will just go to MS instead now. Just my random thoughts. Sony is looking less trustworthy in the eyes of the gamers and developers.
It didn’t sell well on PC either. The high end estimate of its total sales are 2.8mn. And considering how much they gave Kojima to make it, it underperformed.
As someone else pointed out, you don't fund Kojima games for profit. You fund them because they are Kojima games. None of the MGS titles are huge - you are not going to find a 10+ million seller there or anything. I think MGS2 and MGS4 sold 7 million, while MGS3 (considered the best by a lot) sold 4 million.
But Kojima games get a LOT of talk. They win awards. They get you clout. Heck, just saying you are funding Kojima games gets you in the door with dozens of other Japanese developers who respect him.
And as a lifelong PlayStation gamer, and lifelong MGS fan, it is absolutely BONKERS to me that Xbox will be the exclusive console home of both OD (after a billion people online wanting him to follow-up PT with another horror game) and now PHYSINT (after a billion people online wanting him to follow-up MGSV with another espionage game). Like this version of Sony is so different than the one I remember from the early PS days it is crazy.
They get a lot of talk, but at the end of the day, they have to pay the bills. Awards don’t pay the bills, either, and cynically, given how much Geoff Keighley fawns over Kojima, it’s hard to take these awards seriously.
Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil both started out at the same time (not counting the MSX MG games). One series went on to sell 65 million copies and mostly gets an ever-diminishing amount of online hype. The other went on to sell 200 million copies (and counting) and is arguably more relevant than ever. They carried on after the original creator departed. Capcom came out substantially the winner here.
If they want to pay the bills then stop blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on LSG. Sony's biggest financial gen and 99.99% of that wasnt from LSG. Just Helldivers 2 (I think?) but the rest were from Sony being Sony before they went stupid.
If they want to pay bills then they should not have greenlit that Horizon LSG.
It kinda sounds like you're saying "one series went to sell 65 million copies" as if that was a bad thing. That's nuts. 99.9999% of franchises are unable to do that. Most franchises could only dream of achieving that number. If franchises are only worth continuing if they do Resident Evil numbers... then there'd be like what? 3 games released per year?
You know the real reason the Kojima partnership was cancelled?
"Physint" sounds like "Physical" . . . and Sony don't do Physical
Xbox picked up the fumble and ran with it
Or they took on a white elephant. It’s not the 2000s anymore, Kojima isn’t the hot property he used to be. I honestly think that his falling out with Konami was at least partly his own fault,
New video going over this announcement is live - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtaWdQh6H5c
Sony playstation is nothing but pure trash this gen, I hope they go on the brink of bankruptcy again
To be fair they both, ps and xbox, have been trash in many ways.
I can't quite fathom why Playstation would pass on this one. I know that Death Stranding 2 wasn't exactly a huge commercial success, 2 million in the first 9 months is not exactly stellar with today's AAA budget figures, but that was Death Stranding, a wacky new experimental genre Kojima tried where you largely deliver packages.
Physint as I understand it is a spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid since Konami owns the rights to the series and Kojima doesn't want to work with Konami again. Stealth action is what Kojima specializes in, surely this has more sales potential than Death Stranding 2 did, while we never got sales figures for MGS 5, it shipped over 6m before the end of 2015, within 4 months of release.
It was probably another Elders scrolls 6 where it would be years before even entering full production and kojima's ambition and budget expectations were on another level compared to death straning. Kojima also said it took 3 months of searching for a new partner and he ended up with xbox again just like when everyone else rejected OD. SOMETHING about OD and Physint is very unappealing to publishers.
That something is probably development costs. Considering that it's pretty funny Kojima ended up with Microsoft, since Microsoft's been cutting costs even harder than Sony.
What a turn of events! According to Kojima, Sony was planning on cancelling the game
Xbox was fucking up so much player trust, that Sony decided to help them out a little...
Been a while since Xbox broke my trust...
Sony on the other hand lol
I guess you haven't paid attention to or don't care about all the layoffs that are even threatening the existence of whole studios.
That said, you'll struggle to find me saying anything positive about Sony either. I used to be tightly in the Sony camp (after PC, of course), but Sony has become such a despicable company.
Layoffs have nothing to do with consumer trust. Thats part of every buisness ever made.
I don't know if consumer trust has a proper definition, but if I inspect my trust as a consumer, it's definitely affected by layoffs. Hence layoffs affect consumer trust, and the only question is by how much.
Then you can argu that Layoffs can also work in favour of the consumer. Not all circumstances are for the same reasons.
You wouldn't even tell the difference if a company made layoffs if you didnt read about it on the net or they announced it. Hence my point. It has zero affect on the customer.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to accept a "you don't know anything, so you can't comment anything" stance. I don't feel like you're even trying to discuss in good faith, so why should I bother either.
Where did I say "you dont know anything so you cant comment anything?"
I said you wouldn't tell the difference as a customer if a company laid off staff if you didnt hear about it.
Entire studios have been under threat because of the savings. Some might not end up surviving them. That is very clearly visible to me, right now from what we hear from the studios, and in the future possibly from studios closing down.
Layoffs dont always lead to closures, infact layoffs lead to keeping the doors open longer. Layoffs are also mostly clean outs of underpreforming or wreckless staff. Its not always about some amazing worker losing their job, they are normally the ones that keep their jobs.
Like I said, if you didnt read about the layoffs, you wouldn't be able to tell that company had layoffs.
I don't see us agreeing about this even if we continue this discussion, so I don't see any point in continuing. Have a good day, night, or whatever time you might be reading this comment at.
Shame on sony..
Good guy Sony can't stop the good news train
Guys at sony just don't understand business
MS out here flossing about the 5 Sony been left for better days, like sony hit it first and left that ass on the side of the street where they found him when they was done.
All this only to see Xbox to ruin all of future KOJIMA products
Next is new Zone of the Enders only Xbox.
Honestly I'm not surprised Sony no longer wanted to publish the game based of Death Strandings sales and Kojima's lack of commercial success the last decade. He's ambitious but increasingly niche. I hope this project does well and glad Xbox stepped in. Kojima is still a visionary even if he even making big commercial hits
The whole pitch of the Physint announcement was about it being Kojima's return to the action-espionage genre. All the nicheness of the Death Stranding games would be tossed out the window, and more spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid. Hopefully that helps commercial viability.
Weird but... "Xbox and Kojima Productions have announced a relationship that will go beyond games and include film and television."
Is it as simple as Sony didn't want to do that? They just wanted a game but Kojima wanted more which Sony wasn't going to fund?
Kojima basically wanted a blank checkbook. But he also didn’t have a lot to show for it.
Games get cancelled in early development all the time, it probably just didn’t look very good. Sony Cancelled a single player sci-fi game from Santa Monica who then went onto make God of War(2018) instead and cancelled a steampunk open world game by Sucker Punch who went onto develop Ghost of Tsushima instead.
It’s probably still 5 years away and looking at a budget of $200m to realise the full cinematic vision of Kojima, who likely will not settle for anything other than complete 100% creative freedom.
Wow!! 😮
What a twist
