Abstract:
The budget for the collaboration between Hideo Kojima’s espionage action game “Physint” and Xbox was recently rumored to be as high as US$400 million. People with direct knowledge of the contract said Xbox's budget for the project was well below that figure.
Speculation surrounding the partnership comes after Xbox recently restructured and laid off thousands of employees. Some have linked the layoffs to Physint's funding arrangements; sources with access to the relevant contracts deny that the layoffs were to fund the project.
"Physint" was originally announced by PlayStation. It is a work in which Hideo Kojima returns to the espionage action genre represented by "Metal Gear Solid". Xbox subsequently announced its cooperation with Hideo Kojima on the project, and the cooperation budget also attracted attention.
Previously, Chris Dring of GameBusiness said in a podcast that Xbox has a $400 million budget for "Physint." Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier later disputed that number, and Dring walked back his original statement. People with knowledge of the contract say the amount involved in moving forward with the project between Xbox and Kojima Productions is only a fraction of the rumored figure.
The source also raised the possibility that $400 million may correspond to the amount Sony and PlayStation may have previously assumed; this explanation has not been confirmed by contract documents. According to the same source, the agreement negotiated between Xbox and Kojima Productions also involves the licensing of movies and TV series for "Physint" and adjustments to the terms of cooperation for another horror game "OD" between the two parties.
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