After a claim earlier this week suggested that Hideo Kojima’s Physint may have cost upwards of $400 million, rampant speculation about the Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor’s budget ensued. We still don’t know Physint’s actual budget, but Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and Windows Central report that it’s not quite that high.

The hubbub around Physint’s budget

During The Game Business Show on Sept. 24, Christopher Dring briefly mentioned that Physint had a budget of around $400 million. As Xbox recently signed a publishing deal for Physint before laying off hundreds of developers and restructuring some of its studios, the response to this claim was mixed.

Other reporters quickly denied that Physint cost that much. On ResetEra, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier explained that he is usually “hesitant to get into exact numbers without seeing documentation or corroborating them with multiple firsthand sources,” but that “someone at Xbox with firsthand knowledge of the deal told me that they signed Physint for significantly less than this.” Windows Central backed that up, with Xbox sources telling the publication that Physint cost “far lower” and a “fraction” of that supposed $400 million figure.

Dring has since backtracked his claim on X too, pointing to a previous article where he wrote he had “heard everything from $300 million to $600 million” about the budget during Tokyo Game Show and admitted, “whether Xbox paid that, I don’t know.” Essentially, the $400 million ballpark estimate appears to have always been hearsay picked up at an industry event, not an official figure The Game Business confirmed.

Video game budgets are typically quite mysterious, as most major companies don’t publicly reveal them. Kojima Productions, in particular, has told people not to trust information they don’t hear from official sources. It’s quite possible we will never officially learn what Physint’s budget even is, and we certainly won’t this far ahead of launch.

This discourse around Physint’s budget ultimately stems from Xbox making a major investment in it and OD while laying off developers and shuttering studios. It highlights how expensive AAA gaming has gotten and how Xbox is now relying on the biggest IP and game developers it can find for success. Whatever Xbox spent on Physint, that’s money it no longer wanted to invest in the likes of Double Fine, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, and Arkane Studios.