Hideo Kojima‘s Physint might have escaped PlayStation’s chopping block, but bringing it back to life apparently isn’t cheap. After Microsoft swooped in to save his latest espionage game, a recent report claims the project is being made with a staggering multi-million-dollar budget. That’s an eye-watering figure even by AAA standards, while Sony has said it now aims to ‘fail early and cheaply’ after several high-profile projects bombed.
This comes from The Game Business’ Christopher Dring, who put Physint‘s budget at around a staggering $400 million. He discussed this and Microsoft’s current XBOX strategy in the Is Xbox making the right decisions? video. According to Dring, the company is shifting its focus toward ‘bigger bets’ and ‘established franchises’ while cutting smaller projects it considers unnecessary.
“It’s just signed a big game from Hideo Kojima, for example, with a budget reportedly around $400 million,” Dring said, adding that Microsoft is also investing in its new Activision-led Halo team. It’s not known if it includes Kojima’s OD or his other multimedia spin-offs regarding the project.
Interestingly, this seems to have been backed up by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. In his own Xbox Layoffs, Halo To Activision, Destiny’s Back (And More) video, he claimed to have heard rumblings about Physint‘s price tag. According to him, several people ‘approached him’ around Tokyo Game Show 2026 in mid-September and asked whether he’d heard how much Kojima was asking for the project.
“The rumored number — I have not confirmed a number — but the rumored number was pretty significant,” stressed Schreier.
Previously, Schreier also claimed that PlayStation broke off its deal because of ‘missed deadlines’ and was ‘on track’ to be overbudget, and that their negotiations couldn’t reach a ‘satisfying result.’ In the recent video, meanwhile, he believes XBOX agreed to pay less than what Kojima Productions had been asking from PlayStation. Kojima himself said that PlayStation’s decision to back away from Physint took him by surprise.
Nevertheless, all of this follows Kojima Productions’ pushing back against speculation surrounding its split with PlayStation. The studio said none of the claims about its relationship with Sony or Physint‘s production issues came from official or on-the-record sources. It urged fans to treat them with ‘a dose of scepticism.’
If it’s accurate, we couldn’t really blame Sony for getting hesitant about funding another enormous project. Those numbers would put Physint among some of the most expensive gaming projects we’ve ever heard of, other than GTA 6‘s $1 billion budget. Concord, Battlefield 6, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 were reported to have cost around the same amount.
Still, Microsoft apparently thinks Kojima is worth the gamble. Now we’ll just have to see whether its $400 million bet actually pays off.
