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.
David Sears, Creative Director
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 replies, “Yeah, probably.”
Xbox’s creative freedom came at a cost
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.
It’s a shame that things turned out the way they did. It’s hard to know who to fully blame, but Phil Spencer’s vision for Xbox of letting studios have complete creative freedom was fantastic on paper, yet in practice, it clearly didn’t work, especially for this era of gaming.
Who knows, maybe back in the Xbox 360 days, when games were regularly made on smaller budgets within a year or two, it might have been more sustainable. But given the bloated budgets for gaming that exist after 25 years of Xbox, and how development for major games can now span five-plus years, it’s difficult to see how that approach could continue indefinitely.
That said, let me know your thoughts on Sears’ comments. Are they shocking, or are you not surprised at all? Let me know in the comments, and be sure to take part in our poll!
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