PlayStation cancels Kojima's Physint after Death Stranding underperforms

Sony canceled Hideo Kojima's Physint, according to a VGC report citing sources familiar with PlayStation's first-party strategy. The espionage action game — announced in 2022 as a Kojima Productions / PlayStation partnership — is dead. Death Stranding and its 2025 sequel both missed Sony's internal revenue targets, the report says, and Concord's $200 million writeoff sharpened the company's appetite for safer bets.

Physint was pitched as a cinematic Metal Gear successor with real-time performance capture and branching narrative. No gameplay had been shown publicly. Death Stranding sold roughly 5 million copies across PS4/PS5/PC as of late 2023 — respectable for a new IP, but Sony reportedly expected closer to 10 million given Kojima's name and the marketing push. Death Stranding 2 shipped in February 2025; sales figures haven't been disclosed, but the report claims it underperformed projections by a similar margin.

This is the second high-profile Sony cancellation in a month. The studio shuttered its London-based live-service project last week. PlayStation's 2024 slate leaned hard on remasters and safe sequels after Concord bombed — Physint's axing suggests that caution is holding into 2026. Kojima Productions still has an Xbox partnership for OD, a horror game in development with Xbox Game Studios.

If you're still running Death Stranding or DS2, check our settings guides for best-case framerate tweaks — the Decima engine scales well on mid-range hardware if you dial the right knobs.