Xbox apparently isn’t paying close to $400 million for Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear spiritual successor Physint after all, despite recent rumors to the contrary.
In news I don’t think anyone – including Kojima himself – saw coming, Xbox is now publishing Physint instead of PlayStation after Sony decided it wanted to cancel the game entirely. The game’s future is now apparently safe, despite ongoing restructuring at Xbox, but the question of why Sony wanted to drop it at all remains.
One report from Bloomberg claimed that, amongst other things, Physint was set to go “well over budget,” though Kojima Productions released a statement noting that “none of the claims written came from any official or on-the-record source and as such we encourage you to take them with a dose of scepticism.” Even so, whispers about Physint’s budget have continued, with The Game Business editor-in-chief Christopher Dring reporting last week that a budget around $400 million is the figure being suggested the most at bars around Tokyo.
That’s a lot of money, but it sounds like the rumor mill may have exaggerated things slightly. Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, despite being “hesitant to get into exact numbers without seeing documentation or corroborating them with multiple firsthand sources,” suggests in a ResetEra post that Xbox isn’t paying that much. “Someone at Xbox with firsthand knowledge of the deal told me that they signed Physint for significantly less than this,” he writes.
Windows Central’s Jez Corden has shared a similar claim, alleging that sources with direct knowledge of the contracts in question told him that the number is significantly smaller than $400 million. Dring himself has also stated on Twitter since the publication of his original report that “I’ve since been told Xbox is paying ‘quite a bit less’ than that.”
What the game’s actual budget is, then, isn’t clear. It’s rare to see a cheaply made AAA game these days, and you can imagine that’s especially true for a title with lots of Hollywood talent attached to it. In Physint’s case, John Wick 4 star Bill Skarsgård has been cast as the protagonist, and Charlee Fraser, Don Lee, and Minami Hamabe are part of the project, too. Needless to say, I doubt it’s going to be particularly kind to Xbox’s wallet, even if it’s not as massive an ask as $400 million.