After Sony told Hideo Kojima that it would not publish his game Physint in June, Kojima turned to Xbox, which announced today it will publish the auteur’s next game.
In a tweet, Kojima said, “As confirmed earlier through our official channels, in mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the Physint project. Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions.”
“Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner,” Kojima said. “In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in Xbox a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again. Please rest assured that development of Physint, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward.”
Xbox executives like Matthew Ball are celebrating on social media.
It will be interesting to see if Xbox was able to win Kojima over with favorable terms, even though both Microsoft and Sony’s game businesses have both hit hard times. Getting more exclusives is important to Xbox, which went through a period where it embraced multiplatform games (at a time when it faced antitrust risks). But core Xbox gamers expressed their displeasure with that multiplatform policy. Under new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, the Xbox team has reversed that stance and made games like Gears of War: E-Day into exclusives.
Now there’s one more Xbox title coming (at least), thanks to Kojima’s decision. Not only does Xbox have Physint, it also has a previously announced O.D. game.