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The story
Director Hideo Kojima’s remark from a May 2025 interview—that Kojima Productions’ new title PHYSINT would still take another “5 to 6 years” to complete—resurfaced on 5ch and sparked discussion. Working backward, that timeline points to a 2030–2031 release, and since Sony reportedly cut ties with the studio around that same window, reactions poured in along the lines of “well, of course they’d get dropped.” The thread saw pushback comparing this to Death Stranding, which shipped in roughly three and a half years, with some questioning why this project needed so much longer, while others defended the timeline as normal for a big-budget title. The discussion expanded to include theories about needing to build a track record right after going independent, as well as comparisons to Sony’s past decision to pour huge sums into Concord before canceling it.
What people said
Didn't they know that going in when they signed up to be his patron?
You mean 'Patreon' (a joke riffing on the similar-sounding words).
They busted their ass to build a track record.
It was right after going independent, so they probably figured they needed results fast.
He did make it all the way to executive vice president at Konami, so he probably had some idea of what needed to be done.
Maybe he got cut precisely because he went back for seconds?
If DS2, which reused a ton of assets, still took six years and sales were underwhelming, then yeah, of course they'd get cut.
Wasn't that because NetEase told them to make an AAA game?
Still, going independent with just a handful of people and trying to make AAA is a reckless plan either way.
Full-scale production after pre-production usually caps out around 3 years.
It's not like it's manual labor lol.
Though to be fair, Microsoft cuts projects pretty ruthlessly too—
like TFLO and Scalebound.
Even Microsoft doesn't guarantee they'll stick around until a game's finished.
If the budget balloons out of control, they'll cut it in a heartbeat.
I don't think it'd be effortless for them at all.
It'd be a pretty big gamble.
Honestly, if they can recoup costs by 2031, isn't that fine?
Though is the PS5's lifespan maybe already winding down?
And they've been working on it even longer than that—
there's no way it actually comes out in 2031.
they'd have already been cut between Death Stranding 1 and 2.
Death Stranding didn't sell as well as expected, so they finally decided they couldn't afford to wait for the next one.
both Death Stranding titles came out in about that time post-independence—
so why did he say this one needs 5 to 6 years?
Probably because he's also working on OD (his other in-development horror project with Jordan Peele).
Don't companies usually hold some kind of discussion first?
I guess not…
This is a company that unilaterally decided to stop making physical discs.
It's very much a 'We're Sony, you get it?' kind of attitude.
If you're basically told 'I'm not planning to hit the deadline, just let me do whatever I want,' then yeah, that's what happens.
>discussion
No company does that, not just Sony—Microsoft wouldn't either lol.
They cut you off without any explanation, no arguing allowed.
Wait, if Sony were capable of that kind of level-headed judgment, the Concord series wouldn't have shipped a single game 😅
That's exactly why it got cut—because Concord burned them so badly.
Compared to those, this is way more reasonable.
That's exactly why Jim [Ryan] got pushed out.
There's no way Totoki would allow the same thing to happen again.
I have contacts at SIE too, so I get where they're coming from.
For SIE, PHYSINT just isn't a cost-effective project.
They're being asked to invest tens of billions of yen, yet the IP belongs to Kojima Productions, and it goes multiplatform after just a year. Death Stranding didn't have the pull to drive hardware sales either 😅
There's no upside for them 😅
That's just Sony being bad at negotiating contracts lol.
So there was an upside to letting him make two Death Stranding games after all.
Background and Points of Debate
PHYSINT was unveiled at the 2023 PlayStation Showcase as Kojima Productions’ new spy-action title, and it’s been treated as a super-blockbuster project from the start. Since going independent in 2015, Kojima Productions shipped Death Stranding in about three and a half years and its sequel in roughly six, so the gap between that track record and this latest “5 to 6 years” comment became a focal point of debate on the thread. While AAA game development is generally considered to run 3 to 5 years these days, budget and staffing constraints often stretch that out, which is why opinions split over what counts as “normal.” There were also voices questioning the consistency of Sony’s decision-making, pointing to how the company poured huge sums into Concord only to cancel it shortly after launch.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Kojima blabbed in a 2025 interview that PHYSINT was still 5-6 years from completion lol, of course they’d get cut“.
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