Sony has topped a generational run of self-owns: abandoning Hideo Koj…

"What are they doing" is the wrong way to interrogate Sony and PlayStation's decisions in 2026, I think. And they do need to be interrogated – questioned, scrutinized, and, possibly, aggressively shaken by the shoulders in a dimly lit room with bare concrete walls and a lone steel chair. "Why are they doing this" is maybe a more useful question, but it leads us to the same boring answer as ever: money and control (of money). The question on my mind right now is a bit longer: how did Sony manage to abandon a hotly anticipated Hideo Kojima game within 24 hours of the first-party letdown that is Marvel's Wolverine, all in a console generation marred by devastatingly few system-selling games and prices that are headed in the wrong direction?

Don't let anyone tell you the universe doesn't have a sense of humor. Sony has, not uniquely, been trimming its toenails with a shotgun for a while now, but this is some Houdini shit. At a time when PlayStation is desperate for games and the list of PS5 exclusives fits on a napkin, Sony has backed out of publishing Physint, billed as Kojima's return to stealth-action after some tumultuous, naval-gazing years post-Metal Gear Solid. In the process, Sony has hand-delivered Physint to Xbox, the project's new backer. If Microsoft is the better option for a third-party studio, you have messed up colossally.

This news arrived the night of September 9. The morning of September 10, our Marvel's Wolverine review arrived alongside everyone else's to utter a collective, "Eh." Marvel's Wolverine is not awful, my coworkers tell me (and Metacritic agrees), but it is the worst-reviewed Insomniac game in a decade, and it is not the smash-hit that the PS5 needed. It's also a useful lens for evaluating PlayStation's position. Sure, it's a rare less-than-stellar game from Insomniac, but its middling nature is such a blow mostly because of the circumstances around it, and these echo many of Sony's mistakes this generation.

Dead services

Once a first-party powerhouse, PlayStation has spent the PS5 years repeating Microsoft's mistake with Arkane Austin and Redfall on a much larger scale: steering single-player-adept studios toward live service projects in a misguided pursuit of infinite money, and then canning those games or closing the studios altogether when they don't work out. To name a few, games and staff at Bluepoint, Naughty Dog, Bend Studio, Firewalk, Bungie, and reportedly Guerrilla have all contributed to Sony's live service toll, which has left vanishingly few studios available to make some actual games for the PS5.

Saros was good and Ghost of Yotei was great, but in Sony's self-imposed game famine, Marvel's Wolverine was left to carry the weight of Atlas as fans pray that God of War Laufey and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet eventually stick the landing. I don't think it would've reviewed better, but in brighter times, Insomniac's latest likely would've been more warmly received. But years of waiting and enormous expectations have doomed it to become the punching bag for frustrations out of Insomniac's hands.

Sony oversaw the acquisition of Bungie and the end of Destiny 2, the game once meant to serve as a north star for PlayStation's fleet of live service ventures (and, grimly, perhaps has). We can only speculate that Sony has crunched the numbers on Death Stranding 2 and decided that Physint isn't worth the risk and doesn't hold value outside of potential sales returns. I don't even like Kojima's games and that feels shortsighted to me. And Sony has also reportedly pushed to pull back from PC gaming, end support for physical games, and charge more for less anywhere it can while aggressively monetizing a stagnant user base in a mature market which shockingly has not been helped by fewer options, fewer games, and higher prices.

A backdrop of unpopular decisions and leadership failures has made the one-two punch of Physint and Marvel's Wolverine feel like a lot more than, respectively, a dropped and disappointing game. It's hard not to read them as the latest symptoms of a generational misstep. If PlayStation wasn't weighed down by the corpses of live service games, it may have the investment mobility to take on Physint, especially after the relationship built with Kojima Productions through the Death Stranding games. And if those live services hadn't fruitlessly consumed so much of the platform's development resources in recent years – that is, if we had some games coming out – people would probably shrug off a middling Wolverine game. This is just what happens when you go all-in and lose.

The Xbox reset has stoked more headlines, but PlayStation is staring down a sea change of its own after fumbling an unlosable position. It could not be more obvious that the platform's strategy is not working, is hurting game developers, and needs to change dramatically, and we still haven't reached the end of the consequences already set in motion. I'd love to say Sony's capped off a bad year with all of this, but it's only September and I've learned not to underestimate a corporation's capacity or thirst for failure.

Former PlayStation boss sounds just as surprised as everyone else that Sony let Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear successor go to Xbox.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was a tornado while developer Sandfall Interactive was anticipating more of a pleasant breeze, selling a total of over 8 million copies, and helping reset expectations for how hard a AA game is supposed to make you cry. You might think this enormous reception would make publishers more eager to invest in AA and find their very own, relatively inexpensive blockbuster, but fellow mid-tier developer One More Level game director Radek Ratusznik says this isn't the case.

Publishers are squeamish about AA – it's as if all the warm thoughts of berets and fresh baguettes that French JRPG Expedition 33 inspired disappeared as soon as they started reaching for their checkbooks. So Ratusznik, who is leading what I hope will be another AA masterpiece in the zombie Soulslike Valor Mortis, believes the industry needs more unprecedented bestsellers.

It would be nice, wouldn't it? Both for players looking to experience creative risks that usually only small teams are willing to take, and for developers, who could use the encouragement. In any case, Ratusznik tells GamesIndustry.biz at this year's Gamescom, "We had this enormous success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but still publishers find the AA segment quite risky."

The director continues, "We probably need a few more Expedition 33s to just prove them wrong. Maybe one Expedition is not enough. There are also so many companies who can deliver very good titles in the AA scope and budget, not just spending hundreds of millions."

The problem is, some publishers already know this. What they're looking for is more than a lean team that knows what it's doing – they want a miracle, too. Ratusznik explains, "It's not like we can make the game in one year without any trouble. The game still needs proper time to be published and properly tested. I doubt that we can squeeze it that much, as probably some of the publishers would like to."

Unaware of the tribulations of being AA, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Valor Mortis' demo at this year's Summer Game Fest. It's a strange 19th century French battle for moral greyness – which, you know, now that I'm saying it, almost sounds like another Expedition 33. Valor Mortis might be leading the change Ratusznik wants to see.

Ghostrunner devs abandon parkour for Valor Mortis, a first-person soulslike that might explain why the rest of the genre follows Dark Souls' lead.