During a stage event from RTX Sydney, Death Stranding Director Hideo Kojima talked about his partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment.

First of all, he mentioned that he had many offers many offers before signing up with Sony, even from outside the gaming industry. There was even someone from the Arab Emirates who knocked at Kojima-san's door offering a lot of money.

Then he explained why he selected Sony as his partner: Death Stranding is his first title as an independent developer, and Kojima-san wants to make a game that will make everyone happy. So he choose a company with which there he had mutual respect and a relationship.

He worked together with Sony for over twenty years, so he knows everyone from the top down. He wanted to make sure that the first game would be a success, and he thought that by working with Sony there would be little chances that it would fail.

For his first title, it was important for Kojima-san that it would be very creative, Working with Sony, with whom there is mutual respect, he thought that he would be allowed to be creative, and this has proven to be the right choice.

Sony gives Kojima-san 100% creative freedom to do what he needs to do. They'll be in charge of the large-scale promotion activities for the game, but even about Kojima-san still likes to be involved, so they still collaborate on devising the promotion as well.

Any other company would have probably been against showing Norman Reedus naked in the first trailer of Death Stranding, according to Kojima-san. Normal companies would probably be concerned with the content of that trailer, but Sony accepted it, and that's an example of the mutual trust between PlayStation and Kojima Productions.

Incidentally, asked whether Death Stranding is a VR game, Kojima-san mentioned that "at this time Death Stranding is not a VR game."

If you want to learn more, you can read an update on the development of Death Stranding, how Kojima-san isn't thinking about a sequel yet, how the very first game he made was actually canceled, and more details on himself and his games.