The facts:

• Hideo Kojima’s return to stealth-action, Physint, is no longer a PlayStation joint, and Microsoft picked up the ball.
• It still has big Hollywood talent, with Bill Skarsgård in the lead role.
• That’s literally it.

What people are saying:

Alright, so what does that mean?

• Both Corden and Schreier’s sources suggest Kojima Productions is working on a tighter budget with Microsoft than it was with Sony
• It’s unclear how much had already been spent on Physint, and how much of the work on it is transferable—Kojima Productions presumably no longer has access to Sony’s proprietary Decima Engine, for example.
• GamesRadar quoted a rumored budget for Death Stranding 2 “somewhere between $150-200 million.”
• Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2, with a leaked budget of $300 million, is widely agreed to have been an expensive gamble for PlayStation.
• Scooping Kojima was a PR victory for Xbox amid its unpopular, studio-killing “Reset,” but its continued financial woes would give them incentive for doing it on the cheap.
• Whether Sony pulling out was a surprise as Kojima says, or preceded by months of negotiations, as alleged by Bloomberg, Kojima would not have been negotiating from a place of strength with Microsoft—his studio’s health and employees’ livelihoods were on the line.
• None of this strikes me as conducive to making a good videogame under healthy, happy working conditions.
• I really stuck on Schreier’s phrasing, “certain A-list actors attached,” regarding Physint. The game’s first public image of its protagonist looks way more like Robert Pattinson than Bill Skarsgård. Maybe my hopes for Pattinson playing John Physint weren’t just projection on my part…