The state of affairs at Xbox right now is pretty grim. Microsoft's games division is letting go of a total of 3,200 jobs after years of declining financial returns. In discussing this, a lead developer for one of the brand's exclusives last year mentions that he probably wouldn't have funded his own game given where things were at.
Chatting to MinnMax, David Sears, the co-director of South of Midnight, went into where his reluctance would come from. "I literally told people, I was like, 'Yeah, wow, this could be terrible,'" he says.
"Because somebody is going to say one day, the money tap, we're closing those floodgates and that's going to have really traumatic results downstream," he adds. When asked to clarify if he's implying he wouldn't have gotten as behind South of Midnight as Xbox did, he makes it clear that is where he's at.
"Yeah. I mean, I wanted to make it, no doubt, right?" he continues. "Would I have turned off someone else's money flow before South Midnight? Yeah, because I'm not completely selfless."
That's a big statement to make about your own game, but I can understand his perspective. Xbox has clearly been in a difficult position for a while now, and you could probably highlight a bunch of games that were riskier to fund than perhaps necessary. It sure seems like a lot of people have learned the hard way that the money well wasn't as deep as anyone thought, which has led to the current cutbacks.
"It just seems like, in hindsight at least, it was unsustainable," Sears adds. "So, of course, it was going to have a shocking outcome." Hindsight is always 20/20, and at least South of Midnight exists as a result.
