South of Midnight Developer Compulsion Now At 100 Employees

Compulsion Games has now reached 100 employees.

As explained by Klobrille on Twitter, that means it has roughly tripled its staff count since it was acquired by Microsoft in 2018.

Compulsion Games is working on South of Midnight, an upcoming third person action adventure with a fantasy setting, but also set in modern day US South, with a distinctly Southern Gothic theme. They had recently shared their first reveal trailer for the game in this year’s Xbox Games Showcase.

Presumably, Compulsion Games has been working on South of Midnight for quite some time. In October 2021, the studio revealed that they had already doubled in size. A month later, we reported on teasers for South of Midnight, then codenamed Project Midnight, from Windows Central.

While Compulsion Games is best known for We Happy Few up until now, the company has been around since 2009 and actually has a lot of experience in the action video game genre. Before their first original project, Contrast, in 2013, the studio grit its teeth working as a support studio for other games. Those games included Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale, and most notably, Darksiders.

As for their original projects so far, Compulsion Games has attracted attention for bold and interesting new ideas. But anyone who has played We Happy Few or read their reviews know, they aren’t quite able to hit the landing just right.

As a Microsoft studio, we can expect that Compulsion Games will have pretty much the same amount of freedom that they had as an independent studio. Compulsion will hopefully have an easier time with their development process, since they will be working on less platforms, and will have official support from Microsoft to optimize their project for Windows and Xbox.

But as to whether they find their voice with South of Midnight, as much as we would love to see it, it’s definitely too early to tell. But it is definitely exciting that Compulsion Games is getting this opportunity at all. For both Contrast and We Happy Few, they have relied on the trust of different publishers taking a risk. With Microsoft, they can take bigger risks than they ever had before.

In a way, South of Midnight is a return to Compulsion Games’ roots. It is also a somewhat safer bet, as there’s definitely a bigger market for action than adventure and/or puzzle games. We also want to believe that this is the project where Compulsion Games finds their own place in the industry.