Xbox funded and published 2025's South of Midnight, a highly acclaimed action-adventure game set in the American Deep South. The game's creative director, David Sears, said he believes South of Midnight is a "generational" game that he hopes people discover and play for a long time and one that he thought would help elevate the "prestige" of Xbox.

At the same time, Sears said he wasn't sure Microsoft's spending spree under the previous leaders Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond--which is how Sears' studio Compulsion got the funding to make South of Midnight--was going to work out long term.

"I literally told people, I was like, 'Yeah, wow, this could be terrible.' Because somebody is going to say, someday, 'The money tap ... we're closing those floodgates.' And that's going to have really traumatic results downstream," he told Ben Hanson on MinnMax.

Microsoft spent billions and billions of dollars to buy studios and franchises to help get Xbox Game Pass off the ground. The bet did not work out, and now Spencer and Bond are out. The new Xbox CEO is Asha Sharma, and one of her first moves was to cut costs dramatically with layoffs, studio divestures--including Compulsion--and game cancellations. Sharma also talked about how Game Pass needs to evolve into something that's "more enticing to a broader range of customers.”

Asked directly if he had been in control of the Xbox funding at the time, would Sears have stopped writing checks for games like South of Midnight?

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