404: PlayStation Breaks Up With Kojima And Xbox Is His Rebound

Morgan (0:20)

Welcome to the Baunfire Gaming Podcast. I'm your host Morgan, aka Baundiesel. This is episode 404, and this week we'll be talking about Xbox getting Kojima's Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor, Wolverine's underwhelming reviews, Nintendo showing off another remake, and much more. Be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a review on Spotify or iTunes, and subscribe to the Baundiesel YouTube channel to get all of my videos including this podcast. Thank you to everyone who supports as YouTube members or Twitch subscribers, and be sure to check out the links in the description of the episode for my other content and other ways to support.

I don't think there's anything that couldn't be the Kojima breakup with PlayStation to be the first topic, so we're going to talk about that. We had a weird series of events happen a few nights ago, where if the timeline works out correctly, PlayStation put out a statement that they were no longer going to be funding Physint, the game from Kojima Production Studio.

Then really quickly or right after that, Asha Sharma announced that they were taking over, having the deal with Kojima for Physint.

Then the Xbox channel, I believe did the same thing, and Kojima confirmed it as well. Kojima's statement was kind of interesting because it detailed specifically that PlayStation cut their funding. I believe it was back in June, and they've used the last few months to find a new partner and it's Xbox. Now, it is funny, the timing on this is interesting for various reasons. But around that time, Xbox, I believe, Ashish Sharma and Matt Booty, and I assume more of the team was visiting Kojima, and they even have pictures with them where he's holding a Pelican case or whatever they're called, that presumably has an Xbox in it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that was them negotiating this deal, and it just took a few months to get all of the particulars in order.

This is really interesting. For a long time, for my entire life, I would have considered Kojima, whether he was with Konami or even on his own, a PlayStation developer. Even though he's always been a third party, I would argue that, especially since he did his own studio, that they were essentially a second party or whatever. That yeah, they aren't technically owned by Sony or PlayStation, but they were working so closely with them that they might as well be a first party.

The cracks in that started to appear a few years ago with Death Stranding 1, the original game, when after I assume the contractual exclusivity period, Kojima bought the rights and then published Death Stranding 1 on Xbox, after it had already come to PlayStation Day 1 PC, I want to say shortly after, but don't quote me on that.

So, there was already, kind of, you could tell, not a complete dedication to Kojima just being a PlayStation developer at that time, and that's only kind of devolved. I don't believe we have Death Stranding 2 on, I think actually it is on PC, but it's not on Xbox yet. I wouldn't be surprised if that gets announced sooner than later, because I have to imagine that deal is probably about up. I assume it was a year or something like that. I want to say Death Stranding 1, it was maybe 18 months before it came to Xbox. So, this has been pretty interesting. From the reactions to everything, we did get a follow-up article from Shryer, I believe it was him. I know it was Bloomberg, I can't remember if it was actually Shryer or not. But basically, it was for all the reasons I think we could expect. But I think there's more context to it than we've been given. Regardless, that article detailed that the main reasons for PlayStation dropping the support for Physint was due to missed development deadlines and the likelihood of going over the original budget. That's an interesting one because I don't know if Kojima Studios is necessarily doing full development on two games at a time. Maybe they are. This implies they are. I didn't know that. It's worth keeping in mind that I would assume their main project right now is OD, the horror game that's already being published by Xbox, and was supposed to be an Xbox exclusive, which I assume it was and still is.

These missed deadlines are kind of interesting to me because that implies that there must be some full production going on with Physint already, or else there wouldn't really be deadlines to miss. I guess you could have deadlines on pre-production and stuff, maybe, but I don't know. That part's kind of weird to me. Going over the budget, yeah, for sure. I mean, it's Kojima, that sounds like it's part for the course with him. There's also the matter of making games is more expensive today than when they started that project. When they set out an initial budget with PlayStation, it's new things have gotten more expensive since then, unfortunately, even beyond what you would expect, prices that go up. So that makes sense. I think part of this conversation, like you can't have this conversation about why PlayStation has quote unquote broken up with Kojima on Physint without acknowledging that this probably isn't just these issues. If PlayStation wasn't having the issues they've been having for years now, with their, I think it's hard to describe it as anything other than their failed games as a service push where basically every first party studio they have and even third party studios they work with have been pushed to make games as a service games. And almost none of them have actually come to fruition. Most of them have been canceled, one even released and was canceled a week later. And the only actual success in their games as a service push has been Helldivers 2, which was developed by a third party studio and probably has, I would assume, some licensing agreements that makes it not quite as lucrative for the PlayStation as it would be for the first party. Like you can't tell me that those failures aren't part of why this is happening. All of that wasted money and all of that time and all those resources that were put into that. And then you have all of the other factors. Like I said, the increased cost and just in general in the industry and for making games and making hardware, how hardware is down after price jumps that they've had and presumably another price jump sooner than later for PlayStation that will put their prices on par with the Xbox, which just had their own price jump and will make the base consoles more than 50% more expensive than they were when they launched six years ago. Like all of that stuff is probably hurting on the budget side of things. PlayStation, I'm sure is still making plenty of money, doing great on paper. They really brag and obviously they're kind of feathering their cap this generation has been doubling and probably tripling up Xbox and console sales as they, I believe, approach nearly 100 million PS5 sold. But that kind of doesn't matter if you're not putting out those prestige games and things like that. We'll talk about Wolverine, but they've kind of been in a weird spot. This is also strange to me a little bit because they've been very dependent on third-party timed exclusives to kind of save face with how slow their first-party production has been and getting out one or two games a year, which doesn't seem right. Where we have Naughty Dog going almost this entire generation, it's nearly going to be the whole generation without a new game.