Kojima Kept Sony Exit Secret From Staff, Only 3 People Knew

Hideo Kojima reveals only three people knew Sony had pulled funding for PHYSINT, and his team kept working anyway — a quiet rescue that eventually led him to Xbox.

Imagine finding out your biggest project just lost its funding — and deciding to keep it a secret from almost everyone. That's exactly what Hideo Kojima did with PHYSINT.

In an interview with IGN, Kojima revealed that after Sony Interactive Entertainment stopped funding PHYSINT, he didn't tell his staff right away. Following a meeting with SIE, the news was known only to three people: Kojima himself, KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS president Yoji Shinkawa, and Aki Saito.

Just three days later, though, Kojima gathered the PHYSINT team leads and broke the news. He also made them a promise: "I'm going to find a new partner, so don't worry."

Because the project's scale had changed, the PHYSINT team was trimmed down, with some members moved over to OD. Kojima admitted he spent the following week worried that people would walk out. Instead, when he came back to the office the next week, he found the team still actively building new planning materials for PHYSINT, showing zero signs of defeat.

"Wow, I really have a very resilient group of people here," he said.

In the end, the thing Kojima feared never happened. Nobody quit over it, and PHYSINT never actually stopped production. The project kept only a lean core team, but Kojima himself kept pushing development forward every day — worldbuilding, game systems, script, visual design, modeling, casting and scanning actors, plus technical experiments like enemy AI.

"The work hasn't stopped," he explained. "I'm still doing concept design right now."

At the same time, Kojima and his team quietly began hunting for a new partner, which eventually led to talks with Xbox. Only once the new partnership was basically locked in did the studio formally announce the news to all its employees.

The whole saga makes PHYSINT's platform switch pretty dramatic. After Sony pulled its funding, Kojima didn't publicly declare the project dead — he shrank the team while secretly searching for a way out. To the outside world, PHYSINT simply changed publishing partners. But for KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS, it was a silent self-rescue pulled off without alarming most of its own staff.

What do you think of Kojima's secret-keeping strategy — bold leadership or a risky gamble? Let us know in the comments.