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It’s not often a developer admits their own game might not have got the green light if they’d been in charge. But that’s essentially what David Sears, creative director of Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight, said in a recent interview with MinnMax about Xbox’s spending under its previous leadership.
“Somebody is going to say one day... we’re closing those floodgates”
Sears said he had warned people at the time that Xbox's generous funding could end badly. He recalled telling colleagues it “could be terrible”, because one day someone would decide to close the “money tap”, with “really traumatic results downstream”.
When the interviewer pointed out that Sears clearly benefited from Microsoft’s support, and asked whether he would have turned off the tap sooner if he’d been running Xbox, Sears replied: “Yeah, probably.”
He made clear he wanted to make South of Midnight, but admitted he’d likely have stopped funding other people’s projects before it, adding that he’s “not completely selfless”. Looking back, he said the approach “seems like in hindsight at least, it was unsustainable”, so it was always going to have “a shocking outcome”.
South of Midnight’s struggles
South of Midnight launched in April 2025 to positive reviews, but never found a big audience. Microsoft haven’t released sales figures, but on Steam, according to SteamDB, the game’s all-time concurrent player peak is just 1,438.
The game launched on Game Pass on day one, so Steam numbers only tell part of the story. Still, it never became the hit Xbox would have hoped for, and its eventual port to PlayStation 5 didn’t appear to change its fortunes. Compulsion Games was one of four studios Microsoft parted ways with in July, as part of a wider restructuring under new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
Not the only studio with that story
Sears’ comments echo what another former Xbox studio, Double Fine Productions, said in their documentary (7:13), in which they described deliberately pitching their most “unpitchable” idea to Microsoft, and being surprised when it said yes. That project became Keeper, which also failed to become a commercial success. Double Fine was another of the studios Microsoft parted with in July.
Taken together, the comments suggest that, under Xbox’s previous leadership, getting a project approved wasn’t much of a hurdle, which is certainly an interesting situation when compared to the current tides of Xbox only putting their money in the biggest franchises.
Thanks, Idle Sloth
