South of Midnight on Steam Now Pays Compulsion Games, Not Xbox

Every now and then a tiny database change tells a whole story. Open South of Midnight's Steam page today and the publisher line no longer says Xbox Game Studios - it says Compulsion Games. Which means that if you buy this gorgeous Southern Gothic adventure now, your money goes to the people who actually made it.

Honestly, this one got me a little emotional.

The change was first spotted by indie developer Michael Klamerus on Bluesky, and it looks like the last step in the separation between Xbox and Compulsion. The Montreal studio was one of the teams Xbox spun out as independent during its recent "reset" - the restructuring that came with thousands of layoffs and left a lot of talented people looking for work. Amid all that grim news, Compulsion's exit stood out as the least-bad outcome: the studio walked away with its games and with its future back in its own hands.

Why one boring Steam line actually matters

A publisher field sounds like paperwork, and mostly it is. But it decides whose name stands behind a game commercially - and, far more importantly for a small newly independent team, where the money from every sale flows. South of Midnight wasn't just any release either; it picked up awards after launching in 2025, and its hand-crafted, stop-motion-inspired look made it one of those games you recognize from a single screenshot. That's now fully Compulsion's game to carry forward, in every sense.

There's a funny wrinkle in IGN's report, too: Psychonauts 2 still lists Xbox Game Studios as its publisher on Steam, even though Double Fine was part of the same wave of spin-outs. Corporate paperwork clearly moves at its own pace, one game at a time.

I've been quietly rooting for these former Xbox teams ever since the reset was announced. Independence sounds romantic, but it's also scary - no giant safety net, just your games and the people willing to buy them. So if South of Midnight has been sitting on your wishlist, this feels like a lovely moment to finally grab it. Hazel's story now directly supports the team that poured themselves into it, and that's the kind of ending I can happily root for.

Image: Kyu3a / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xbox_Series_X%E3%81%A8Series_S.jpg