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.