South Of Midnight Director Says He Doesn’t Think Xbox Should Have Funded It

Now free to pursue its own destiny independent of Xbox, South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games has been actively looking for collaborative work with other partners. But given some comments recently made by creative director David Sears, I wouldn’t be surprised if Compulsion’s next project was something very, very different from South of Midnight; after all, Sears doesn’t think that game was a great business decision to begin with.

In an interview with MinnMax‘s Ben Hanson, Sears speaks at length about Xbox’s decision to fund games like South of Midnight and Double Fine’s Keeper, games which he and Xbox knew would probably not make lots of money (and in fact did not) but would increase Xbox’s prestige, or serve as cultural cornerstones for generations to come. However, he also says that he told people during development, “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.”

Hanson then summarizes what he thinks Sears is saying. “So the idea is, you’re thankful that Microsoft supported the hell out of South of Midnight…but you would not have funded it yourself?”

Sears replied, “Yeah, probably.” He continued:

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. Of course it was going to have a “shocking” outcome. It’s easy to dissect it now. But at the time, I would talk to other directors and [they’d] be like, “How is this happening? How did we get so lucky? Is this a golden era?” And I’d always be like (he sucks in air through his teeth) “For now.” And there’s always a night when Rome burns. I didn’t know exactly when it would be, but I was always worried about it.

Sears concludes this thought by remarking that the Microsoft of today is much “more humane” than the company he knew in the ’90s, as demonstrated by the fact that it let studios spin off in the first place instead of just shutting them down entirely.

In addition to South of Midnight, Compulsion Games is also known for 2018’s 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 as a part of Xbox’s recent restructuring, taking with it all its IP and an unknown amount of financial runway. It’s currently unknown whether or not the studio has signed a new project yet.

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