South of Midnight was one of 2025’s seemingly innumerable highlights—in their 83% review, evergreen writer Andrea Shearon called it “a Deep South delight drenched in superstition and pain.” If you’ve been holding off but nonetheless rooting for the award-winning studio behind it, Compulsion Games, now’s a great time to dive in: it’s independent again after a lengthy stay under the Xbox Game Studios banner.
After rumors of closure came in the wake of Xbox’s most recent layoff-heavy bloodbath, Compulsion announced it’d be leaving Microsoft instead and pursuing other partnerships. On Thursday, CEO Guillaume Provost explained to GamesBeat that “the management buyout is complete and that it owns its original intellectual property games again, as Microsoft has transferred the IP back to Compulsion Games,” according to the article. “Provost said management has acquired the studio and staff as well.”
Granted, if you happened to be avoiding games by Microsoft-owned studios because of the BDS boycott protesting the roles of various corporations in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, this particular game and others like it were already excepted by some advocates. No Games For Genocide named it as a possible exception due to its indie-like production scale and “themes of black liberation” in its FAQ, saying “it’s worth putting our time, energy and efforts into building mass boycotts for the larger titles.”
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Still, if you’ve been holding out, the studio now gets a bigger cut of the money when you buy the game now and Microsoft gets none, assuming you don’t buy it through the Xbox digital storefront. And regardless of any of that, it’s still noteworthy as a critical time for the studio also behind We Happy Few and 2013’s Contrast. Sustainably cutting ties with such a huge publisher is no easy feat, and the turmoil at Xbox already had Compulsion devs looking for new jobs before the infamous “reset” even took place.
