Earlier this week I shared a post from a friend who noted that South of Midnight‘s publisher information had changed on PC game storefront Steam. It no longer listed Xbox Game Studios but instead listed the developer, Compulsion Games, as the publisher. I thought this was great. South of Midnight was caught by the BDS boycott at the worst possible moment, literally releasing something like five days after the BDS National Committee put out its call to action. If Compulsion had gotten publishing rights back from Microsoft after the corporation decided to cut ties with the studio earlier this summer, then it would no longer be under the boycott, and it is a game that deserves more attention than it received.
However, upon closer inspection, Steam is in fact the only place where South of Midnight‘s publisher information has changed. Looking at the storefronts for the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation, and most importantly, Xbox, Microsoft is still listed as the publisher for the game on each one.
That evening, outlets began reporting on the Steam publisher change. Respec, a new outlet from the folks over at RPG Site, noted that the game had changed to self-published status on Steam but that the console versions still read as Xbox Game Studios and the copyright for the game on steam still said Microsoft Corporation. Kotaku took the change to mean that “Compulsion Games now holds all rights to South of Midnight and any proceeds from a purchase go to it now, not Xbox.”
GameSpot followed suit:
As noticed by Respec, Xbox is no longer listed as the publisher for South of Midnight on Steam. Instead, the game is noted as being self-published by Compulsion Games, reflecting the studio’s independence following another round of severe layoffs and restructuring from Xbox.
While Compulsion Games hasn’t confirmed whether this is the case–who knows what type of strange and awful backroom clauses might be in place to ensure Xbox keeps getting a slice of this particular pie–this does seem to indicate that all future sales of South of Midnight on Steam will benefit Compulsion, not Compulsion and Xbox.
And so did IGN:
Xbox’s separation from Compulsion Games – one of four studios it spun out independently during the recent Xbox “reset” amidst thousands of layoffs – appears to be complete, as the developer itself is now listed as the publisher of 2025’s award-winning South of Midnight on Steam instead of Xbox Game Studios.
I can understand desperately wanting something to be true and putting it out there in the hopes that it is (this is also specifically not actual journalism), but notably none of the writers of the articles listed above explicitly state that they reached out to Compulsion to confirm whether or not the change on Steam meant that the game was no longer owned by Microsoft or giving the megacorp any more money.
So Friend of the Site Autumn Wright did it.
Autumn, along with folks like Jake Steinberg, Grace Benfell and Puke, has been a major advocate for games media to adhere to the BDS boycott since it was announced in April 2025. Through their periodic Dialogue interview series at Unwinnable, they are also a student and historian of the dying games media ecosystem. They reached out to Compulsion Games after all of these other articles had been posted, and asked the one simple question everyone else should’ve also asked merely as a matter of course:
Does Microsoft/Xbox still receive any money from the of sales of any of your games (and which ones)? Is this dependent on platform? When did this change take place for each platform?
They have not heard back from the studio. Bafflingly, their post, which was about as neutral as a piece of media criticism can be and ends on a relatable note (“I am doing this in between filling out job applications for other careers and am not pressed enough about needing to buy a videogame to pursue it further with the zero resources afforded to a freelancer” same tbh), made some folks upset; I saw the post get called “disingenuous,” a “strange shot based on bad faith interpretation,” and “combative.”
In reality, Autumn’s post was functionally no different from the posts made by Respec, IGN, Kotaku and GameSpot. It conveyed the same basic information; if anything, the difference sat in the rhetoric used around the (lack of) confirmation from Compulsion Games. Rather than excitedly trying to persuade people to go out and buy South of Midnight now, as three out of four of those posts by major games media sites did, Autumn’s post displayed a basic journalistic skepticism and a desire to verify a claim that was otherwise unsubstantiated. Is South of Midnight totally self-published now? We Don’t Know.
The BDS boycott is not an ego-satiating purity test designed by white leftists with delusions of grandeur and a superiority complex. It is the rational, reasonable and conservative response to decades upon decades of Israeli apartheid and genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and the rest of the occupied territories. The part of the BDS boycott that is targeting Microsoft is not all-encompassing and totalizing; it is targeted specifically at the easiest thing for someone to stop using; in this case, Xbox hardware and Microsoft-published software. Games like Call of Duty, Fallout, Keeper and South of Midnight. A confirmed and material change to the publishing contract of games put out by studios like Compulsion and Double-Fine under Microsoft ownership would mean that those games would no longer fall under the boycott. And that would be a good thing! Otherwise, if everything stays the same with those contracts, nothing changes with those games’ boycott status. And that’s why confirmation mattered.
Unfortunately whether or not we will ever actually know is probably a moot question at this point. Everyone has already posted their excited promotional pieces; Compulsion isn’t likely to ruin what is effectively a new spate of good marketing around their game with an honest answer to the question of whether or not they’re still giving Microsoft a cut of residuals off the game’s sales. For my part, I’m certainly not comfortable recommending the game anymore; my friend, who initially posted on Bluesky that they noticed Compulsion had changed their publisher on Steam, has deleted their post because of all this. And unless Compulsion displays a possibly-studio-ruining amount of moral clarity and does actually provide anyone with an answer in the coming weeks, it’s possible that this is where things will sit forever: a game and a studio stuck in the limbo between principled adherence to a boycott of their former parent company, and proper independence – and recognition.
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