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?”

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.

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