#396: Tag team

This week, shy and retiring Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima revealed that a few months ago PlayStation abruptly backed out of a deal to publish and finance Physint, a stealth-action game announced in 2024. Suddenly facing the cancellation of what he has admitted in interviews might be his last game — a fitting swan-song, too, given its promised return to his Metal Gear roots — Kojima hit the phones, and Microsoft picked up. Xbox will now publish Physint, just as it will publish OD, Kojima’s mysterious horror-game collaboration with Hollywood pal Jordan Peele. As such a man whose entire career has, until now, been inexorably intertwined with PlayStation seems set to drop the curtain with a couple of Xbox exclusives.

Now, clearly we have limited insight into what’s been going on behind the scenes. Kojima’s games these days are big investments: scanning the faces and sexy footses of his ever-growing posse of Hollywood chums costs money and takes time, and the man himself has never let such inconveniences impact too much upon his art. He said last year that Physint was likely five or six years away, and with OD supposedly on the boil as well that always felt like a conservative estimate. We do not know what shape the game is currently in, or even if it is in any shape at all. Evidently Sony has run the numbers, factored in the rather modest sales of Death Stranding 2 — just 2m copies by June, according to the abacus fans at Alinea; the first game racked up 5m sales in 18 months — and decided that, in its margin-obsessed era, the sums just don’t add up. Sony’s loss is of course Xbox’s gain, though whether this is really something for the three-and-a-half remaining Xbox fans to cheer is debatable. How many of those layoffs, cancellations and selloffs that Microsoft announced in July can we directly ascribe to its decision to write Kojima another big cheque?

Logical as this all might appear, there is nonetheless something very wrong about Sony, whose gaming division reported a 37% increase in profits a few weeks ago, deciding to jettison one of the final surviving architects of its gaming legacy because it doesn’t think there’s enough money in it. At a time when its line-up of studios is finding it increasingly difficult to get a game out the door, I'm not sure I see the logic in turning your back on a platform-exclusive swan song from one of the most recognisable and revered game-makers on the planet. Still, as an illustration of Where We Are with this whole thing, it doesn’t get much better. You think we’re in the business of making art? Of funding cool shit that makes us look good, because we believe in that stuff and recognise the wider value of it? My dear boy, what year do you think this is? 2008?

Obviously not, no, though I increasingly find myself yearning for it. These are confounding times for games, and the longer you’ve been into them, the more confounding things probably seem. We grew up in a world where platform holders strived to make consoles affordable, and hardware got cheaper over time; one in which, when a gang of developers found success, not only were their jobs secure but their next gig was guaranteed, and in many cases they were pretty much set for life. That world clearly no longer exists, and Sony letting Kojima run off to Microsoft is just more proof of how dumb and wrong and weird things have become. I do not know exactly how we got here, cannot pin down the precise moment at which things went off the rails and we got shunted, Sliding Doors-style, into this timeline. Covid? AI? The death of E3? Dunno. All I really know is that nothing makes sense anymore. To love games, and to follow the culture and business around them, these days is to basically constantly wonder if you are having a stroke.

In the good old days, our industry titans would take turns at being the good and bad guys. One would make a right old hash of things and the other one would clean up, then they'd each release a new console and swap places. However conscious we were of it at the time, this has for decades been the game industry’s circadian rhythm; we need one company to champion, and one to demonise. Yet at some point in the 2020s, both Microsoft and Sony flicked the villain switch at the same time. They now take turns to show us their arse, helpfully knocking their rival out of the headlines with their latest round of short-sighted layoffs or dimbulb business decisions. Can I have someone to root for, please? Someone to pat on the back? No? Thought not. Carry on I guess.

MORE!

• Relax, everyone, apparently Sony’s remaking Killzone. That’ll fix it.
• The Kojima news took the heat off Microsoft, which last week announced playtime limits on cloud-streamed games through Game Pass: just five, ten or 15 hours per month are now allowed depending on your subscription tier. (Microsoft said the change would only affect 4% of subscribers, a stat I’m sure it intended to downplay the severity of it; to me it felt more like they were shouting about what a dreadful mess they’d made of what, at one time, looked like a real competitive advantage. Four percent! What a bunch of losers.) Anyway! Microsoft has since had to walk it back a bit, seemingly after realising that legislation in other, better-run countries prevents companies from screwing over existing subscribers. Game Pass members in Australia, Brazil, Poland and Germany, among others, have been emailed by Microsoft to assure them they’ll be exempt from the new rules while their subscription remains active.
• It’s been a pretty bad week for Steam, too, after the automated database of achievement-tracking website Exophase was suddenly updated with work-in-progress achievements lists for hundreds of in-development, and in some cases unannounced, games. Oops! Exophase owner Mike Bendel reckons Valve’s API dropped a bollock. Not a great look for Valve, whatever the cause, particularly coming so soon after it emerged that it’s had 13TB of internal documentation and prototype builds sat on a publicly accessible server for god knows how long. For a man with so many yachts, you’d expect Gabe Newell to run a tighter ship.
• With its acquisition by the bad guys complete, EA can now comfortably rip off the mask. And lo: it has confirmed the use of AI voice generation for commentary in NHL 2027. “The broadcast is built on a direct and ongoing partnership with John Buccigross and Darren Pang,” a spokesperson GPT’ed. “With their full consent and active collaboration, we are using AI voice technology to expand on the 50+ recording sessions they have already completed.”
• Life Is Strange creator Dontnod is still in an awful mess. It’s laying off 90 staff as part of a ‘transformation project’, and admitted to investors that it may not survive beyond January 2027.
• The Trump administration has quietly yanked a Tetris clone from its browser-based fascism arcade after realising that Tetris Company head honcho Henk Rogers likes a lawsuit almost as much as the president. “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them,” the company said in a statement before the game was taken down. “We take copyright infringement very seriously.”
• There’s nothing I can add to this headline to make it any funnier than it already is, so I might as well copy-paste it: "Ikea has released a Skyrim mod where players are accompanied by a Kallax shelving unit voiced by Matt Berry." Truly lovely stuff.

That’s your lot! Have a great weekend etc, and I’ll see you next week.