{"id":903765,"date":"2026-11-02T23:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T23:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/903765\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T23:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T23:46:08","slug":"south-of-midnight-director-says-he-doesnt-think-xbox-should-have-funded-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/903765\/","title":{"rendered":"South Of Midnight Director Says He Doesn’t Think Xbox Should Have Funded It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now free to pursue its own destiny independent of Xbox, South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games has been actively looking for collaborative work<\/a> with other partners. But given some comments recently made by creative director David Sears, I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Compulsion\u2019s next project was something very, very different from South of Midnight; after all, Sears doesn\u2019t think that game was a great business decision to begin with.<\/p>\n

In an interview with MinnMax\u2018s Ben Hanson, Sears speaks at length about Xbox\u2019s decision to fund games like South of Midnight and Double Fine\u2019s Keeper, games which he and Xbox knew would probably not make lots of money (and in fact did not) but would increase Xbox\u2019s prestige, or serve as cultural cornerstones for generations to come. However, he also says that he told people during development, \u201cSomebody is going to say, one day, \u2018The money tap, we\u2019re closing those floodgates.\u2019 And that\u2019s going to have really traumatic results downstream.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hanson then summarizes what he thinks Sears is saying. \u201cSo the idea is, you\u2019re thankful that Microsoft supported the hell out of South of Midnight\u2026but you would not have funded it yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sears replied, \u201cYeah, probably.\u201d He continued:<\/p>\n

I wanted to make it. No doubt. Obviously. Because we made it. Would I have turned off someone else\u2019s money flow before South of Midnight? Yeah. Because I\u2019m not completely selfless. It just seems like, in hindsight at least, it was unsustainable. Of course it was going to have a \u201cshocking\u201d outcome. It\u2019s easy to dissect it now. But at the time, I would talk to other directors and [they\u2019d] be like, \u201cHow is this happening? How did we get so lucky? Is this a golden era?\u201d And I\u2019d always be like (he sucks in air through his teeth) \u201cFor now.\u201d And there\u2019s always a night when Rome burns. I didn\u2019t know exactly when it would be, but I was always worried about it.<\/p>\n

Sears concludes this thought by remarking that the Microsoft of today is much \u201cmore humane\u201d than the company he knew in the \u201990s, as demonstrated by the fact that it let studios spin off in the first place instead of just shutting them down entirely.<\/p>\n

In addition to South of Midnight, Compulsion Games is also known for 2018\u2019s We Happy Few, which it made with Gearbox Publishing. It was acquired by Microsoft just ahead of that release to join Xbox Game Studios, and began working on South of Midnight, which was nominated for and won numerous awards after its launch in 2025, including a BAFTA. Compulsion was spun out from Microsoft<\/a> as a part of Xbox\u2019s recent restructuring, taking with it all its IP and an unknown amount of financial runway. It\u2019s currently unknown whether or not the studio has signed a new project yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now free to pursue its own destiny independent of Xbox, South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":903766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1281,237936,74,1298],"class_list":["post-903765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-microsoft","tag-south-of-midnight","tag-technology","tag-xbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/903766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}