Summary
Compulsion Games parted ways with former owners Xbox, having landed on the long list of things Microsoft were determined to ditch as part of multi-round mass cuts this year. Now, South of Midnight creative director David Sears has suggested that an eventual pulling of the rug was something he feared throughout the game’s development, to the point where he seemingly doesn’t think he’d have funded it if he’d been in the shoes of Xbox execs. In an interview with MinnMax, Sears - who left Compulsion in March 2025 - outlined that ideally games big publishers put out aim to fall into one of two buckets. They either make lots of money or increase the prestige of the brand by becoming cultural touchstones across multiple generations. Obviously doing both is the perfect outcome, but Sears pegged South of Midnight as being more geared towards the latter camp. The likes of Double Fine’s Keeper and Obsidian’s Pentiment are other games which off the top of my head could be said to fit that same mold. The issue, of course, is that when push comes to shove, it’s the games which can show a strong bottom line at any given moment which make the best case for their studios’ short term survival if cash is tight. So, South of Midnight lived in a risky place, with Sears recalling: “I literally told people. I was like, yeah, this could be terrible because somebody is going to say, one day, ‘The money tap, we’re closing those floodgates’ and that’s going to have really traumatic results downstream”. The interviewer then asked Sears if what he was getting at is that, while he’s glad Xbox funded South of Midnight, he might not have done so or at least cut the funding earlier if he was in charge of the console maker. Watch on YouTube “Yeah, probably,” Sears replied. “I mean, I wanted to make it. No doubt. Obviously, because we made it. Would I have turned off someone else’s money flow before South of Midnight? Yeah, because I’m not completely selfless. It just seems like, in hindsight at least, it was unsustainable. So, of course, it was going to have a ‘shocking’ outcome. I mean, it’s easy to dissect it now, right? But at the time, I would talk to other directors and [they] would be like, ‘How is this happening? I mean, how did we get so lucky? Is this a golden era?’ And I would always be like, ‘For now’. There’s always a night when Rome burns and I didn’t know exactly when it would be, but I was always worried about it.” Notably, Sears added that in his view modern Microsoft showed a “more humane” side than the version of the company that existed in the 90s and early 2000s by giving studios like Compulsion a chance to spin out on their own rather than simply shuttering them outright once they were deemed surplus to requirements. Given the director’s no longer at Compulsion, it seems he’ll not have a say on what their next game looks like, but as a newly indie studio one would imagine they’ll have a keen eye on the bottom line. Read this next
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