A report on Bloomberg has unearthed the primary reasons why Sony decided to drop Kojima Productions’ stealth title Physint, which earlier this week was confirmed to have found a new home in Xbox.
Citing people familiar with the project, Jason Schreier’s report stated that one of the main factors in Sony abandoning Physint is due to Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2 failing to meet Sony’s revenue expectations. In addition, Physint itself has reportedly missed numerous deadlines and was on track to be “well over budget” despite the fact it won’t be out for years yet.
Furthermore, it is claimed that PlayStation wasn’t keen on investing hundreds of millions of dollars into another title that wouldn’t be made exclusive to PlayStation hardware permanently. As an example, Death Stranding and its sequel were timed PlayStation exclusives, having launched for other formats at a later date.
The report also states that Xbox decided to snap up Physint for a number of reasons, one of them being PC, which provided a source of revenue for the Death Stranding games. With Sony reportedly no longer bringing its single-player games to the PC, the hardware manufacturer would not benefit from a PC version of Physint if released by Kojima Productions on its own or with another publisher. However, Xbox delivers all its titles to PC and plans on doing the same for Physint, according to Bloomberg’s sources.
In addition, Xbox’s publishing deal for Physint also includes the film and television rights to the project alongside a second Kojima Productions, the horror-themed OD. Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, has stated that expanding Xbox IPs to linear media forms a major part of her strategy in reinvigorating the platform.
Physint is currently in development at Kojima Productions and is without a release date.