South of Midnight game director David Sears believes that Microsoft initially chose an unsustainable model for funding Xbox games. In his opinion, a major corporation inevitably begins cutting its least profitable business lines sooner or later. Furthermore, Sears admitted that if he were running Xbox, he probably would have refused to fund the project himself.
However, David Sears, who left Compulsion Games in March 2025, had doubted the long-term sustainability of such a strategy from the very beginning. In an interview with MinnMax, he noted that Microsoft funded numerous studios and games, but such a policy could prove overly costly for a major company.
According to the developer, he wanted to create projects with reasonable budgets that did not require maintaining a massive team and would not jeopardize the financial health of Microsoft’s gaming division.
I thought: great, you guys seem to have an endless amount of money, do whatever you want. But I wanted less. I didn’t want to feel the weight of responsibility for a huge budget or an army of 600 people. I wanted to make something that wouldn’t put Microsoft or the company’s gaming division on the brink of bankruptcy.
He also compared his concerns to the so-called Cassandra complex—a situation where someone foresees an impending problem, but those around them fail to heed the warnings.
Sears hoped South of Midnight would be a major commercial success, but understood that Microsoft could one day stop funding such projects.
I was literally telling people: this could end in disaster. One day someone is just going to say, “That’s it, we’re shutting off the money tap,”—and the consequences for everyone involved will be extremely painful.
When the interviewer asked directly whether he would have canceled funding for South of Midnight had he been in the Xbox chief’s shoes, Sears answered affirmatively, albeit with some caveats.
Yeah, probably. I really wanted to make this game, no doubt. But would I cut funding for someone else’s project for the sake of it? Yes, because I’m not that selfless.
Earlier, Compulsion Games CEO Guillaume Provost explained that the studio’s objective within Xbox was not to produce Call of Duty-level blockbusters, but rather to release unusual projects capable of attracting a new audience and diversifying the platform’s gaming library.