South of Midnight’s Director David Sears Admits He Probably Wouldn’t Have Funded the Game If He Were Xbox: “In Hindsight, Xbox’s Limitless Funding Was Unsustainable”

How often do you hear a developer admitting that they probably wouldn't have funded their own game if they were the publisher? Not very often, to say the least. And yet that's exactly what David Sears suggested in a brutally honest interview with Ben Hansson from MinnMax, referring to South of Midnight, which he co-directed alongside Jasmin Roy at Compulsion Games.

Sears, a 30-plus-year industry veteran who is mostly known for his work on the SOCOM franchise, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Compulsion's previous game We Happy Few, clarified that he was extremely concerned about Xbox's seemingly carefree way with which they used to greenlight projects, even those that weren't likely to be successful:

They were funding a lot of games. They were also funding a lot of studios that, you know, I was like, well, okay, great. I guess you have infinite money... On one hand, if everyone you're working with is either trying to make generational games at not a huge expense, or games that have huge or really significant contemporary commercial appeal, great. It's going to work. But when does that ever happen?

I would talk to other directors and would be like, 'How is this happening? How did we get so lucky? Is this a golden era?' And I would always be like, 'For now, right? 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.

I literally told people, 'Yeah, this could be terrible.' Because somebody is going to say one day, 'We're closing those floodgates.' And that's going to have really traumatic results downstream."

Eventually, that's exactly what happened, leading to new CEO Asha Sharma's big Xbox reset: mass layoffs, studio closures, and the like. Compulsion Games was thankfully able to go independent, like Double Fine and Undead Labs, but Ninja Theory is facing closure, and Arkane could soon be subjected to the same sad fate.

Sears actually praised Microsoft for being much more humane than they were, for example, in the 1990-2000s, and for supporting South of Midnight's vision. However, the kicker came when he practically admitted he wouldn't have funded the game if he were an Xbox executive:

Yeah, probably. I mean, I wanted to make it. No doubt, and obviously, because we made it. Would I have turned off someone else's money flow before South of Midnight? Yeah, 'cause I'm not completely selfless. But it just seems like, in hindsight at least, it was unsustainable. So, of course it was going to have a shocking outcome.

That kind of thing isn't likely to happen again under Sharma's tenure. Speaking to Fortune, inXile CEO Brian Fargo recently claimed that Xbox studios must now present a proper "investable business case" rather than expecting blank-check funding.

As for South of Midnight, it got fairly positive reviews from critics. On Wccftech, the game earned a 7 out of 10 review score from David Carcasole, who wrote at the time:

South of Midnight has some incredibly strong storytelling chops, brought together by its stunning visual design and excellent soundtrack. Unfortunately, the experience is bogged down by boring, repetitive combat and lackluster platforming, but it's worth rushing through those parts to experience everything else South of Midnight has to offer.

However, despite eventually launching on all platforms (it reached PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 about a year after the PC and Xbox launches), it's believed to have been largely unsuccessful commercially.

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