Hideo Kojima to part ways with Sony, will bring his new gaming projects to Xbox

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Metal Gear Breakup: Hideo Kojima's new game is still years away, but fans are eagerly awaiting the action-espionage blockbuster the Japanese designer is working on. Most likely, the game will not be a PlayStation exclusive after the Tokyo-based company decided to end its partnership with Kojima and stop funding his projects.

Hideo Kojima recently announced that his upcoming games have found a new home. The Japanese designer and auteur, together with his company, Kojima Productions, will partner with Microsoft and Xbox to develop and publish Physint, OD, and the other projects announced last year.

Kojima confirmed that Sony was going to cancel Physint, which is intended to serve as a spiritual successor to the legendary Metal Gear franchise. However, Physint is a project that both Kojima and his company were determined to keep alive. The team spent the past three months looking for a new business partner, which it has now found through a deal announced on Kojima's official social channels.

Kojima Productions and Microsoft apparently share a common vision for the future of video games, so Kojima will now use Microsoft's money to keep Physint, OD, and his other projects alive until release. Physint is poised to be a new genre-defining action-espionage title worthy of the Metal Gear lineage, Kojima confirmed.

– HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) September 10, 2026

While the designer announced the new partnership with Xbox, PlayStation confirmed the "difficult decision" to end its partnership with Kojima Productions. Sony is still looking to maintain a "strong" relationship with the Japanese studio, although it no longer wants to spend money funding its expensive gaming projects while they remain years away from release.

According to people familiar with the matter, Sony had indeed decided to pull the plug on the collaboration as a pure business move. The studio's executives are now concerned that Physint will go significantly over budget, fail to generate sufficient returns, and cease to be a prized PlayStation exclusive after a brief period of time.

The executives were apparently unimpressed with the market performance of Kojima's previous games, Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. The titles did not meet Sony's internal revenue expectations, the sources said, and were later ported to other platforms by Kojima Productions. Official sales data say that Death Stranding has reached more than 20 million players worldwide, while the 2025 sequel sold more than two million copies after coming to PC earlier this year.

The Death Stranding games were not exactly a business failure, but Sony is having a pretty rough time right now and wants even more money to push its questionable live-service strategy. The company recently decided that exclusivity is a successful business strategy, although former executives are not in agreement with this new direction.

Of course, Xbox has its own business issues to deal with. The company's strategy of turning everything into a cloud service is failing spectacularly before the world's eyes, and new CEO Asha Sharma is definitely using the hatchet rather than the chisel to try to steer the sinking ship back on course.

After Kojima's announcement, Xbox said that the team was "honored" to partner with the legendary studio behind Metal Gear and Death Stranding. The Metal Gear saga helped Sony establish PlayStation as a major force in the modern gaming industry at the turn of the millennium, but Kojima parted ways with the brand's owner, Konami Group, in 2015.

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Hideo Kojima to part ways with Sony, will bring his new gaming projects to Xbox

 

[lonetac]

Never thought Id see the day. But its a win in my book because that means the games will likely come out on PC too. Woot woot!

 

[Megalomaniac]

Personally, I'd rather see Konami get back to classics.
Gradius, Contra... Castelvania ( I think is safe).

 

[yRaz]

Sony is really burning every bridge they have. Watching investors say "we don't want to fund this game because it's not making ENOUGH money" while they dump billions into games that constantly fail is kind of heart warming. Gamers don't care about margins, they care if something respects their time.

His game will likely be great and I bet it will sell better now because of all the free publicity. How more obvious can Sony be then by distancing themselves from developers that make games for gamers while simultaneously investing billions into monitization methods wearing the skin of a videogame on top? They seem to have forgotten that game companies need to sell games

They seem surprised everytime their *not game* flops.

 

[noel24]

One post lower on TS, Ubisoft is dying. I think old guard, now owned by vulture equity funds is dying. It's interesting to see how future of entertainment will look.

 

[The Talking Tech]

Sony truly lost their way...

Not only they are responsible for the biggest anti-PlayStation sentiment in history among people that once supported the brand thanks to their anti-consumer decisions, but also they're now burning bridges with possibly the biggest gaming personality that PlayStation fans hold dear.

This is definitely a win for Xbox!

 

[dangh]

Honestly, Kojima didn't proved he actually can still create a good game, metal gear is really, really old now.. And ms closed so many studios recently that not sure what will he do there. At this point he just should focus on pc.
As for sony, they either going to create games or will have a bad time. Ps5 is so poor gaming wise it's stupid. Great platform, but totally undeveloped. I haven't bought any new game there, just small Indies, because it's all just ps4 remakes.

 

[Xenocea]

Never thought Id see the day. But its a win in my book because that means the games will likely come out on PC too. Woot woot!

Yup, it's a win.

 

[Xenocea]

I love Kojima and think we need weird auteurs like him making art. But the reality is video games are expensive. They aren’t cheap. Even if Sony broke even on that deal, it’s not worth tying up hundreds of millions of dollars for years with no meaningful return.

Even as someone who loves his games, I can admit he’s overly self indulgent. When it comes to creatives like Kojima there needs to be limits set or else he would never release anything.

Someone on Reddit made a good point. Christopher Nolan makes his own brand of art. But he always meets his deadlines and comes under budget. He understands that art costs money to make and that you can’t spend forever making a project.

While I love Kojima I think he’s a case where the industry fawns of him and is never critical. To the point that I think he’s a bit delusional when it comes to what is reasonable for his games.

I actually think Xbox is being reckless here. Didn’t they just lay off thousands of employees? Wasn’t their sole reason for doing this because Xbox was operating at a loss? In what world would it make sense to fund PHYSINT when it’s not even an Xbox exclusive? And even if it was, it’s not going to make profit enough to overcome the ballooning budget and missed deadlines.

 

[Watzupken]

Does it really matter being with Sony or Microsoft? Aren't both companies doing the same when it comes to game development? It is no more about exploring and making fun games nowadays. It is all about taking the least risk and effort to make the most revenue they can.

 

[yRaz]

Does it really matter being with Sony or Microsoft? Aren't both companies doing the same when it comes to game development? It is no more about exploring and making fun games nowadays. It is all about taking the least risk and effort to make the most revenue they can.

It's interesting you said that. It is now common knowledge what tricks these games contain. When live service was new, you could trick people into them. People might find a really good one they like and spend some money on. I actually really like ESO and I've spent money on that game, but when I do I always feel like I got my money out of it, it's also impossible to just pay for progression. But now the world have played their third fourth or even more live service games. People are familiar with the business model and are tired of it. Lots of very expensive games have gotten shut down less than a year after release simply because the business model doesn't work anymore. Meanwhile, the companies keep telling use which games we need to like and those games keep failing. What Sony had was an easy lunch. Everyone gave up their easy lunches for the promise of high margin returns. The studios fail and now we see lots of indie devs popping up from people who left either while the studios were failing or after they were shut down.