Sony put too much faith in Kojima. The latest project of the Japanese genius, according to rumors, failed to make a return on investment. Now the company plans for Kojima Productions to develop a game based on the popular IP and with a smaller budget.
This is according to one of the moderators of the Resetera forum nicknamed Dusk Golem. He begins his post by cautioning that he cannot speak with full confidence about the reliability of his sources. That said, here’s what he knows:
- Death Stranding was a failure. Initially the game sold well, but then its sales almost came to a halt. Currently, more than 3 million copies of the game are gathering dust in warehouses.
- The production didn’t go smoothly. Initially, the game was supposed to be darker and scarier. However, a year and a half before the release, the development was soft rebooted.
- Sony and Kojima Productions had disagreements. Moreover, other Sony studios were unhappy with the budget the company was spending on Death Stranding. All this led to the fact that Death Stranding is not among the PlayStation 5 titles, and the game itself had to be rushed towards its release despite the soft reboot mid-production.
- Sony plans to work out a deal with Konami to fund the development of a new Silent Hill game. Kojima Productions will work on the title, feeling all revanchist after the failure of Death Stranding.
- Sony believes that developing a lower-budget horror game based on the popular IP and with the name of Kojima on the cover will allow them to make good money, and the game itself may turn out to be a strong title for the platform.
- Besides a potential Silent Hill game from Kojima Productions, Keiichiro Toyama and the employees of Team Silent, closed in 2005, will work on another project based on this IP. Toyama and the team were responsible for creating the original series of games.
Two facts indirectly confirm the weak sales of Death Stranding. First, Sony did not share any milestones (for comparison, when God of War sold 3.1 million copies in the first three days, Sony reported this a month later). Second, the game really quickly left the US and UK charts. At the same time, in Japan, the game was the largest launch of a new IP in the region for the current generation of consoles.