Sony Pulls Funding for Kojima's Physint, Engine Access in Doubt

Well, this one stings. A deep-dive report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has peeled back the curtain on the messy breakup between Sony and Kojima Productions — and it sounds like things got complicated fast.

According to people familiar with the matter, Sony Interactive Entertainment officially told Kojima Productions back in mid-June that it would no longer fund Physint, the spy-action game announced in 2024 that Hideo Kojima himself described as a return to his Metal Gear roots. Three big reasons reportedly drove the call: Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach both fell short of Sony's revenue expectations, Physint missed multiple internal deadlines while its budget drifted toward serious overrun, and Sony simply lost appetite for bankrolling a timed exclusive where Kojima Productions keeps the IP and the game eventually lands on other platforms anyway.

The report also points to a wider chill inside PlayStation. After the disaster of Concord and the ongoing struggles of Marathon, Sony has reportedly tightened its grip on internal production milestones, leading to multiple cancellations. Add in an AI-driven hardware cost crunch, and the company seems more interested in squeezing revenue from its existing player base than taking huge risks to chase new users. Bloomberg specifically notes that film and TV adaptations tied to Physint — which originally involved Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures — were shelved right alongside the game.

So what happened next? Kojima apparently spent about three months shopping for a new partner before landing with Microsoft. Xbox will now handle publishing for Physint on Xbox and PC, and it also picked up the film and TV rights for both Physint and OD, Kojima Productions' horror title.

Here's the detail that really raised eyebrows: Bloomberg's report initially stated Kojima Productions "will no longer be able to use the Decima engine," before an edit softened it to "may lose access." Decima is built by Sony's Guerrilla Games, and Kojima Productions received the engine's source code back in 2017. The two studios have co-developed tech on the same codebase, both Death Stranding games were made on Decima, and even Physint's motion capture work has used it. If access really goes away, Kojima Productions faces the brutal task of migrating the entire project to a new engine.

It's a wild turn for a partnership that once looked rock solid. We'll be watching closely to see how this shakes out.

What do you make of all this — is losing Decima a dealbreaker for Physint, or can Kojima work his magic elsewhere? Drop your thoughts below.