South of Midnight Director Says He Would Not Have Funded the Game at Xbox
The creative director of South of Midnight says that, in Xbox's position, he would not have funded the game.
David Sears made the remark in an interview with MinnMax, as Video Games Chronicle reported on 3 November 2026. He said he appreciated Xbox backing non-mainstream games to widen the range of titles on its platform. He also said he felt that plan was destined to fail, because a large company will eventually cut its least profitable parts.
Sears has also said he wanted to make the game. In a separate report, Kotaku carried his view that he wanted to make South of Midnight, while questioning whether Xbox should have funded it.
South of Midnight is a third-person action game, meaning the player watches the character from behind and over the shoulder. Compulsion Games developed it. Jasmin Roy was the game director and Whitney Clayton the art director, according to Xbox's 2024 interviews with the team. The team made several trips to the American South to capture the look and feel of the game.
The game launched for Xbox consoles and PC in April 2025. It came to PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 in March 2026. According to the publisher's figures reported by Video Games Chronicle, it drew more than one million players in its first three weeks, counting both sales and players on Game Pass, Microsoft's subscription service that offers a library of games for a monthly fee.
Compulsion Games chief executive Guillaume Provost has described the studio's role at Xbox differently. He said its job was not to make blockbusters such as Call of Duty. It was to make games that add distinctiveness and variety to the lineup.
That role was tested in July 2026. Microsoft announced it was cutting five studios and thousands of jobs as part of a business reset, and Compulsion Games was among the studios named. Instead of closing the studio, Microsoft agreed a deal that lets Compulsion Games go independent.
So the studio that made South of Midnight is now separate from Xbox, and its director has said publicly that he doubted a company of Xbox's size would keep funding a game like it.
