10 comments

  • kushalpandya 1 minute ago
    While PlayStation is on a streak of one bad decision after the other, I'd give them benefit of the doubt here.

    Kojima likes to work unhinged on grand ideas with a tall budget which may stick or not stick at all. So may be Sony didn't like the direction of Physint and decided to dump it.

    While Sony may be wrong in judging the game in its early stage, the replacement publisher, Microsoft, has solid track record of terrible taste at creating exclusives.

  • zzzbra 1 hour ago
    Pretty remarkable. There are only three reasons I intend to buy a PS5 and Kojima games are one of them.
  • AdmiralAsshat 32 minutes ago
    Surprised Valve didn't try to step in. There was a comment from a former Valve employee that they had tried to recruit Kojima for an earlier project (probably Death Stranding) but got outbid.
    • samrus 16 minutes ago
      Probably got outbid again. I love valve's business model/strategy/ethics, but its undeniable that a tradeoff for not being beholden to increasing shareholder value is that you often have less resources than your competitors for making big moves like this, since youre not raising capital from shareholders
      • Hamuko 12 minutes ago
        I imagine the problem isn't Valve's cash on hand but just their willingness to spend it.
  • carlos-menezes 1 hour ago
    This is very strange given the long-standing relationship between the two parties.
    • MYEUHD 1 hour ago
      Death Stranding 2 underperformed.

      It sold only 2-3 million copies which, depending on how much money they spent on development and marketing, may be a net loss

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Stranding_2%3A_On_the_Be...

      • anonymous908213 55 minutes ago
        Severing your relationship with a generation-defining artist because they had one whiff that only brought in $140,000,000+ in revenue seems shortsighted, even if you actually did lose money on that entry. About what I would expect from the MBA-driven economy, though. Your golden goose has shit out 10 golden eggs for you, then it lays one regular egg and you try to kill it. Except you fail and somebody else gets your goose instead.
        • poloniculmov 10 minutes ago
          Kojima has a history of overspending by trying to make grandiose but weird games. And while they performed well, MGS4 sold less then The Last of Us or other big hits. I think that Kojima's games are games that people talk about more than they play. Probably MGS5 is the only one that actually "plays good".
          • stevefan1999 4 minutes ago
            Back then gaming wasn't as big as it is today. It does make sense to have TLOU outsold MGS4, they have 5 years gap, it is more than a decade later for both games now. I think we need to talk about percentage impacts rather than absolute numbers.
        • embedding-shape 44 minutes ago
          Really odd indeed, many of the Sony executives used to be relatively "It's OK to fail once, you've proven you can output stuff given resources", but seemingly there is a new Sony now where cutting costs and not doing bets isn't part of the culture anymore. Sad to see.
          • musha68k 15 minutes ago
            It's still the same kind of leadership that also closed Japan Studio as well as Studio Liverpool.

            They don't understand what made the brand great in aggregate.

      • Hamuko 11 minutes ago
        No wonder they made me pay 80€ for it. Making up for the losses.
  • mococa 56 minutes ago
  • proxysna 1 hour ago
    I mean every time that Kojima made a game it turned out to be something that people talk about for years on. But the second it gets slightly more ambitious investors get their panties in the knot about it even though throughout history Kojima's products made a massive return. This split will also, in my opinion, lead to Kojima losing access to Decima engine, which sucks in a whole different way.
    • walrus01 1 hour ago
      > something that people talk about for years on

      In the case of MGS4 and MGS5, because they're weirdly horny... Like, MGS5 was a good game, but you can't tell me that Kojima doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about bikini clad snipers.

      • maplant 15 minutes ago
        People don’t talk about quite much, when they talk about MGSV they talk about how insanely good of a stealth action game it is.
        • DanielHB 1 minute ago
          I was top 1000 for a while in the base-invasion mode of MGSV in the EU. That mode was basically a low-budget little tacked-on multiplayer that kept the core-gameplay and I spent hundreds of hours on it.

          MGSV Metal Gear Online (the _other_ tacked-on multiplayer) was also great, but very unreliable netcode made it frustrating.

          I wish someone would just take that game engine and make another good game on it. I _almost_ bought metal gear survive on the engine alone, that is how good it is.

      • bluefirebrand 57 minutes ago
        Which is probably fine because the target demographic for those games probably loves bikini clad snipers
        • walrus01 54 minutes ago
          I think the other trademark is Kojima, when he's not being weirdly horny, is just "supernatural and weird". Like the other stuff with the floating boy/psycho mantis, man on fire, parasite unit. When you've got the weirdly horny and supernatural mashed together, it's either a Kojima game or some variant of Biohazard (Resident Evil).
    • IslandRebel 1 hour ago
      I never bothered Death Stranding and everything after MGS-3 has been very meh IMO. He didn't really want to make MGS 4 & 5.

      MGS 3 itself while an excellent game overstays it welcome after you defeat "The End" IMO.

      The games that he is well known for at this point are really 20+ years old.

      • proxysna 58 minutes ago
        He didn't really want to make MGS4 and MGS5 and then still made successful games. Death Stranding franchise is one of the "games that he is well known for" and it is most def not 20+ years old. Dont see your point.
      • pizzalife 1 hour ago
        I totally disagree. Death Stranding was groundbreaking in many ways.
        • froh42 1 hour ago
          Yes. And DS2 was somehow boring. It felt like a DLC for DS.
          • bluefirebrand 54 minutes ago
            I don't really understand when people find more of a good game to be boring. It's ok to take a break if you're tired of the formula or whatever but I dunno

            To me it seems like saying "oh no, not another delicious steak today, I couldn't possibly"

            I guess people just prefer more novelty than I do?

            • embedding-shape 42 minutes ago
              People gotten used to the idea of "Same as existing but more/small additions" should actually be a DLC/addon, not worthy of incrementing the number and being a successor. For those, you need to completely change the entire thing to something else, then people are fine, and it's a hit/miss if the existing players like it.

              Otherwise people feel like the parent, that it's just slightly different than before but incrementally improved, and should therefore be a DLC.

            • BoingBoomTschak 22 minutes ago
              Would you say the same about more obviously artistic mediums? "Oh, their second album sounds exactly like their first which I liked!" isn't a compliment, usually.
  • hnrprtlpdb 46 minutes ago
    who actually owns the physint IP — kojima productions or sony? if sony paid for preproduction that handoff gets messy fast
  • olivierestsage 1 hour ago
    Talk about an unforced error on Sony's part
  • hn9zmdcaou 1 hour ago
    decima was sony's though — xbox port means new engine, that's the real delay
    • DiabloD3 1 hour ago
      No, Guerrilla Games. The engine also already runs on virtually every platform, including the Xbox and PC, but also phones.

      Even though Guerilla Games is currently owned by Playstation Studios, they are still effectively an independent studio.

      Microsoft, otoh, owns like half a dozen engines, uses none of them, and licenses none of them. The only way I'd see a engine swap happening is if Kojima somehow swung a deal to license the newest version of the Doom engine.

      • jordand 24 minutes ago
        Nearly no chance idTech is being used for anything outside of the few franchises that leverage it, as modern idTech versions are mainly geared towards just those FPS games. id Software has been decimated too in the recent layoffs, and there's questions over the future of idTech
  • sparrowidle 20 minutes ago
    [dead]