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The story
Sony notified Kojima Productions — the studio led by former Konami developer Hideo Kojima — that it was cutting off development funding for the new title PHYSINT during a Zoom meeting in June 2026, Kojima revealed in an interview with IGN. PHYSINT had generated buzz after being unveiled on PlayStation Direct, but has now had its funding source cut off. On 5ch, the news sparked discussion of ballooning AAA development costs and labor-cost structures, suspicion that reports of a “mid-2030s completion” may actually have been a misreport, and broader debate over what’s ailing the industry.
In June, I got word from SIE that they wanted to set up a Zoom call to talk. I was incredibly busy at the time — I’d just been to New York for a Prada event, and right after that I went to Los Angeles too. Anyway, I came back and had that conversation over Zoom.
That’s when they told me they couldn’t provide any more development funding for PHYSINT. I was in shock, and I asked, “What did you just say?” I couldn’t process it right away. I asked again, “What do you mean?” but they just kept repeating the same thing.
— You’ve said Sony never explained its reason for the cancellation. Was there ever any explanation given afterward?
Source: jp.ign.com / Read the original article here
What people said
Thought it said 'katsudon' for a second
Landing a hit once doesn't guarantee the next one will too
Guess he got the wrong idea
And that delay is on Kojima himself (he's making OD/Overdose first with Microsoft's money), so there's nothing to be done about it
That's so far in the future it's funny
If you actually look at what he said in the original interview,
he just said it'd take about 5 more years —
so really it's more like 2030
Whoever wrote 'mid-2030s' flat-out misreported it
PS is fine worldwide since it's got GTA6 coming
In Japan though, even the Switch 2 has slowed way down — it's only selling about a third of what the original Switch did — so consoles in general are shaky there
Nah, that's wrong
it's just the 'Buhitch' (a mocking nickname for the Switch) that's done
Kojima's signing Hollywood stars left and right for this one, so costs are probably going to balloon even more
The former SCE president said that even for sequels in the same series,
PS5 titles now cost double the budget of their PS4 counterparts, and they can't recoup the investment
Tsushima and Wolverine are made by different studios though, is that even accurate?
The arm hair is something else
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2061917143445209090/vid/avc1/2104×1206/ZjmPPL0bayuTHWSp.mp4?tag=27
The horror game's backed by Microsoft to begin with, so it was never coming to PlayStation anyway
Isn't it the other way around — he's the one who did the betraying
Personally, it offered the same or less appeal than what you can already get in free games, yet it was a full-price new IP
and on top of that had almost no media exposure — of course it wasn't going to sell well right out of the gate
Since they cut their losses and pulled the plug immediately after launch, it looks like they also killed off any shot at it building sales slowly through word of mouth
What could possibly cost that much
Back in the SFC (Super Famicom) days you could make a whole game for like 10 million yen in six months to a year
These days development costs alone reportedly run even higher than that, and once you add marketing it goes up further
Though it's all estimates and analyst talk plus old comments from Yo Matsuyama (veteran game producer), so who knows how accurate it is
AAA titles can have crews of over 1,000 people
Even if only a quarter are actual in-house staff, tying up people earning an average of 6 million yen a year for three to four years adds up to tens of billions of yen on its own
Dishonest people getting cut loose happens everywhere, that's nothing new
It's not that it won't sell — the problem is it'd come out decades later and wouldn't even be exclusive
Did that guy also jump to another company, blow through a ton of money, and get kicked out?
Kishimoto was already a mess back during NARUTO itself
Background and Key Points of This Story
Kojima Productions has operated under Sony’s funding ever since Hideo Kojima went independent from Konami in 2015, producing titles like the Death Stranding series, and PHYSINT was announced as a new project built on that same funding relationship. In the thread, a long back-and-forth played out between posters who blamed the rise in development costs on “political correctness” or “the left,” and others who countered that the failure of underperforming titles like Concord came down to a plain lack of polish rather than ideology — the argument was never resolved (this article omits that particular back-and-forth). At the same time, some pointed out that the reason AAA development budgets balloon into the tens of billions of yen is the labor-cost structure behind tying up staff numbering in the hundreds for several years at a stretch, suggesting this isn’t a problem unique to any one company. One note: the phrase “gone silent” in the original thread title actually refers to Sony notifying Kojima of the funding cutoff over a Zoom call — it’s easy to misread as if all contact literally stopped, but that wasn’t the case.
*This article is composed of excerpts and summaries from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Sony Cuts Metal Gear’s Former Director Loose, Then Goes Silent………………“
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