By 
Kojima Productions announced that its new action-espionage game Physint will no longer be published by Sony, with Microsoft expanding the two companies’ Xbox partnership and stepping in as the new publisher. Before the announcement, I was curious about Physint. I like Metal Gear and Death Stranding, so I wanted to see what the studio could do with an espionage game without Snake’s shadow looming over them. However, after this announcement, I won’t be playing Physint. Not if Xbox is publishing it and as long as Microsoft continues to be complicit in the Gaza genocide.
I similarly had no interest in Kojima Productions and Xbox’s game OD, once I learned about the No Games for Genocide campaign. And yet the recent Physint and Xbox announcement feels tone deaf in a unique way. It’s strange to see Hideo Kojima, a developer known for creating games with a staunch anti-war messaging, suddenly not care and take his new espionage game to the same company that is providing technology and resources used for the surveillance and persecution of Palestinian civilians. And I get it! Kojima is a businessman first and foremost. He’s got a studio to run. But there’s no way I can take Metal Gear or any of his body of work seriously after this decision. How can someone claim to be anti-war, but only care about some conflicts and some deaths?
It’s not like Microsoft’s complicity in the Gaza genocide is information that would be easy to miss for a company the size of Kojima Productions. The BDS Movement widely reported on the use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and AI services by Israel’s military. If you’re not familiar with it, the BDS Movement is a series of Palestinian-led campaigns calling for people to pressure Israel into complying with international law and end the genocide of the Palestinian people, by applying economic and political pressure on priority targets.
One such target is Microsoft, and Xbox by extension. The movement doesn’t only apply to people heading a company, of course. Kojima might not feel squeamish about getting in bed with war criminals, but I personally don’t want my money to facilitate a genocide. The aforementioned No Games for Genocide website has plenty of information on how people can participate in the Xbox boycott, with various tiers of engagement available. And it has been proven that the BDS movement works.
Here’s the other thing about Physint, though. There are way too many games coming out every year—more than I will get to play in my lifetime. And there are even more games already out that I won’t get to play before I die. Video games in general are a luxury. They’re not a basic need, but they’re something that I love and enjoy deeply, and that I want to see get better. But it doesn’t matter how good Physint is. Entertainment—a luxury—will never be more important than the lives of innocent people. There are too many games coming out all the time. I can simply sit this one out.
