South of Midnight creative director David Sears recently made a surprisingly candid admission in an interview, saying that if he had been responsible for Xbox's budget decisions, he "probably" wouldn't have approved funding for the project.

This bizarre (or perhaps expected) twist now links two Xbox-related studios with comments questioning whether their games should have been funded at all. Before this, online drama surrounded Double Fine (Psychonauts, Keeper) saying something similar, albeit in a more tongue-in-cheek way.

I literally told people, I was like, yeah, this is, wow, this could be terrible, because somebody is going to say one day, you know, the money tap, it was like, we're closing those floodgates, and that's going to have really traumatic results downstream.

To which MinnMax's Ben Hanson asked: “You would not have funded it yourself? If you were actually running Xbox, you would have been like, ‘No, turn off that tap much quicker?’”

Sears went on to explain: “Yeah, I mean, I wanted to make it, no doubt, right? And obviously because we made it. Um, you know, would I have turned off, you know, someone else's money flow before South of Midnight? Yeah, cuz I'm not completely selfless.”

“But, you know, it just seems like in hindsight at least, it was unsustainable. So, of course, it was going to have a, you know, shocking outcome.”

Interestingly, Sears wasn't entirely critical of Microsoft. Earlier in the interview, he praised the company's support for South of Midnight, saying, “ Microsoft encouraged everything ,” while describing the creative freedom Compulsion Games enjoyed during development.

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