Xbox Is Cutting A Bunch Of Stuff Loose, But Not Hideo Kojima’s New Horror Game OD

Hideo Kojima’s upcoming horror project titled OD, which is increasingly giving P.T. vibes, was first teased three years ago. It was part of an ambitious new slate of third-party partner games published by Xbox. Microsoft has since abandoned a number of those collaborations, but not OD. A source familiar with the company’s plans says it remains safe even as other investments are re-evaluated.

As first reported by IGN, the Kojima Productions horror game will still be published by Xbox even as the console maker decides to cut ties with other in-development games as part of a recently announced “reset.” “I wanted to go beyond the limit of the ‘scariness’ that other games had reached,” Kojima told Entertainment Weekly regarding OD earlier this month. “It’s a single-player game, and I wanted to make it as scary as possible. But for those that might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going. I can’t say much more, because it’ll give too much of a hint on the system, and I could get in trouble for saying too much!”

Otherwise, we still know very little about the project originally greenlit by Phil Spencer, including how it will play or even when it might come out. The game was first teased at the 2023 Xbox summer showcase and later announced in full at the 2023 Game Awards. It featured the involvement of Hollywood director/writer Jordan Peele and was set to star Sophia Lillis (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves), Hunter Schafer (Euphoria), and the late, great Udo Kier (Flesh for Frankenstein). Oh, it’s also being made in Unreal Engine.

OD‘s reveal was Microsoft’s way of planting a flag in the ever-shifting console war battlefield to signal it was serious about supporting ambitious and risky games helmed by creative visionaries. But the Activision Blizzard acquisition also closed in 2023, and months later, Xbox was already facing mass layoffs. Microsoft has now walked away from a number of bets in the past 12 months alone.

It canceled a publishing deal with Brenda and John Romero for their new game last June. Game File recently reported that Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Désilets was originally partnered with Xbox for his new action game 1666: Amsterdam before the collaboration fell through. And just today, Microsoft confirmed that it will no longer publish IO Interactive’s upcoming Project Fantasy IP. Kotaku understands that the project was already scaled back in the prior wave of Xbox cuts in the summer of 2025.

“We’re not reducing our overall investment in games,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg. “We expect to invest about the same in content as we did last year. What’s changing is where we’re investing and the kinds of projects we’re backing.”

That was echoed in a harsh memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma a few weeks back. “We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand, but we have not adequately funded them to compete and win,” she wrote. “At the same time, as we saw this past weekend at Showcase, a reliable pipeline of first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to our success. We need to reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities for the next 5 years.”

A recent report from The Information claims that Sharma is planning to invest more resources into blockbuster franchises like Halo and Fallout, while cutting investment across much of the rest of the portfolio. But if that’s the case, it could be years before the first green shoots of that new strategy appear. In the meantime, a bunch of Xbox studios and potentially over 1,000 employees are on the chopping block.

“I feel like the industry’s in a really horrible place,” Brenda Romero said back in March. “I mean, we were there in the ’80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier.”