As part of speculation regarding Sony’s decision to drop its publishing deal for Kojima Productions’ Physint, one of the reasons is believed to have been the game’s reportedly massive budget. However, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s recent statement in an interview with The New York Times might indicate otherwise. She confirmed that the company is spending “substantially below” what it typically does to develop a premium game.
Interestingly, Sharma also confirmed that the agreement between Xbox and Kojima Productions for Physint includes film and TV rights.
Sharma’s statement essentially confirms a report from earlier this week that indicated that the deal was worth “a fraction” of the rumored $400 million budget for Physint. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier took to the ResetEra forums to talk about how, while he was “hesitant to get into exact numbers without seeing documentation or corroborating them with multiple firsthand sources”, “Someone at Xbox with firsthand knowledge of the deal told me they signed Physint for significantly less than this.”
Schreier’s report was echoed by Jez Corden of Windows Central, who noted that “first-hand sources” have told him about how Xbox’s deal to publish Physint ends up with the company paying “far lower than” the $400 million figure.
A report from earlier this month had indicated that Physint was shaping up to be “well over budget” and that its release was still quite some time away, leading to Sony dropping its agreement to publish it. The project had seemingly also missed deadlines. This, combined with the fact that the Death Stranding games not being commercial juggernauts, led to PlayStation reassessing what would have been “hundreds of millions” of dollars in investments on the project.
In a follow-up report, Schreier said that the publishing deal between Kojima Productions and Sony was dropped after “several months of negotiations” between the two companies. Responding to Kojima’s own statement about being surprised by the event, Schreier noted that the deal’s cancelation “wasn’t exactly out of nowhere.”
“I saw the statement from Kojima Productions today — it doesn’t dispute any of our reporting, so I don’t have much to add there. But I will add that (as I said a couple of weeks ago), the Physint cancellation came after several months of negotiations between KoPro and Sony. Wasn’t exactly out of nowhere.”
In the meantime, Kojima has continued to talk about Physint as development on the title continues. In a recent interview, he said that he didn’t expect Sony to drop the agreement since Physint “is the biggest selling title I could possibly create”, and noted that Sony’s decision left him “shocked and surprised”.
Kojima also hasn’t confirmed whether Physint will make it to the PS5 when it finally comes out following the studio’s deal with Sony falling through. He did, however, speak about how Kojima Productions is going to work with Xbox’s various teams to get “a lot of technological support”. He hasn’t yet revealed whether the title will continue to be developed with Guerrilla Games’ Decima engine or if the studio will move to another game engine.
