‘I was just shocked and surprised’: Hideo Kojima says Sony told him Physint was being cancelled over a Zoom call

Hideo Kojima has shed more light on what happened when Sony told him it was cancelling his Physint project.

Physint was previously set to be published by PlayStation Studios, but earlier this month Kojima Productions moved the game’s production over to Xbox instead, after stating that PlayStation had tried to cancel the project.

At the time of the announcement, Kojima said he had “unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the Physint project”, while Sony said it had “made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions on its project Physint”.

Now, in an interview with The Washington Post, Kojima and studio president Shinji Hirano have spoken more about the moment they were told about Sony’s plans to cancel the project.

The pair say Sony delivered the news to them in mid-June via a Zoom call, but have declined to confirm who exactly it was at Sony who made the call.

“I just went totally blank when they told me,” Hirano recalled (via an interpreter). “The biggest surprise was Hideo’s actions after that. He went back to his room and started working.”

Kojima explained (also via an interpreter) that rather than feeling angry or upset, he was more concerned about his staff at Kojima Productions, of which there are nearly 200.

“I was just shocked and surprised,” he told the publication. “I didn’t have any anger or sadness. I was just thinking ‘what should I do?’. It’s a big problem for us and I couldn’t tell staff at the time.”

He added: “We’re an independent studio. That means if they can’t fund us, our studio could collapse.”

Kojima also explained that Physint was originally conceived after he fell ill in 2020, following which he and Jim Ryan – who was at the time CEO and president of Sony Interactive Entertainment – agreed to make another stealth game.

Ryan left Sony in early 2024, around the same time that Kojima and PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst officially announced Physint.

Saying he wished he’d been told earlier in the project that Sony wanted to pull the plug on it, Kojima said: “We couldn’t understand it. Jim Ryan had already retired, but I thought this was a project that Sony Interactive Entertainment and I had agreed to team up on and make together.”

Kojima says he didn’t want go through another cancellation like PT

Kojima said his concerns were mainly for his staff, especially because he had already experienced the same thing at Konami when his Silent Hills project – which had previously been announced with the infamous PT demo – was cancelled.

“The cast I already talked to and negotiated with, other artists and collaborators who were all happy to do it… I can’t tell them this is cancelled, especially after what we went through with PT,” he explained. “I didn’t want to go back and do it again and say to the actors ‘this is cancelled’.”

He added: “This is the 10th anniversary of Kojima Productions and my personal 40th anniversary of making games, and in the midst of all that, this was an important title for me.”

Despite what happened and the subsequent decision to move to Xbox and continue development of Physint there, Kojima says it hasn’t affected his relationship with the Sony brand.

“Corporations are like living things,” he explained. “I still have this relationship with Sony. I use Sony cameras, Walkman still. We’re not in a dispute. We’re not fighting with them.”

Over the weekend, Kojima Productions posted a statement on its X account, asking players to treat “with a dose of scepticism” a recent report on why Sony cancelled Physint.

The Bloomberg report claimed that Physint was set to be cancelled by PlayStation due to the Death Stranding games not meeting Sony’s revenue expectations, and claimed that Physint had reportedly missed deadlines and “was on track to be well over budget despite being years away from release,” according to people said to be familiar with the project.

Explaining to players that it didn’t normally comment on “unsubstantiated speculation” but felt the need to speak out this time, Kojima Productions’ statement said: “None of the claims written came from any official or on-the-record source and as such we encourage you to take them with a dose of scepticism.”