No Reply
On August 13, 2026, Respec reported that Compulsion Games' South of Midnight is now listed as a self-published game on Steam.
Kotaku repackaged the story with a notable spin: There Is No Reason Not To Play South Of Midnight Anymore. The context, which Kotaku alludes to as "hangups" with a hyperlink: Xbox Studios and Microsoft published games are a priority target of BDS. Kotaku's all-but-stated claim is that South of Midnight no longer falls under the BDS boycott. The stated claim is that "any proceeds from a purchase [on Steam] go to [Compulsion Games] now, not Xbox."
GameSpot published a similar article stating "all future sales of South of Midnight on Steam will benefit Compulsion, not Compulsion and Xbox." It is oddly contorted to avoid addressing BDS or Palestinian solidarity. As Jake Steinberg shared on Bluesky, "The premise of this piece only makes sense because people have been boycotting Microsoft games through BDS/It says people don't want to line Xbox's pockets then rewrites the reason as layoffs. Using the boycott as your hook but erasing its politics is quite gross."
IGN followed suit, claiming in the dek, "Your purchase dollars will now go directly to the developers," but again only pointed to the Steam page change. It mentions recent mass layoffs, but no other reason people may suddenly want to purchase the game. It confusingly ends with a list of links to other Xbox things you can spend money on.
Respec, Kotaku, GameSpot, and IGN's articles all cite that the publisher has changed on the game's Steam page to support their (different, separate) claims. GameSpot, at least, acknowledges that "Compulsion Games hasn’t confirmed" if Steam sales still benefit Xbox, though it is an odd concession to make since this would undermine the article. No outlet mentioned any attempt to confirm this info from Compulsion Games or Microsoft, and it's unclear if any other fact-checking was done. (As commenters on Bluesky have pointed out, the publisher has not changed on Nintendo or PlayStation's storefronts at time of writing.) Maybe it is just that straightforward, though. Maybe we should all just buy South of Midnight now.
The stakes of the factual basis of this news are acting in solidarity with Palestinians or supporting a company that has maintained its complicity in and profiting from the surveillance of Palestinians amidst the well documented torture and genocide of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, not just playing a videogame. This development, like all journalistic statements of fact, deserves something more concrete than inference. So, I emailed Compulsion Games.
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Thursday, August 13th, 2026 at 12:46 PM
From:autumnwright@protonmail.com
To: media@compulsiongames.com
Subject: Press Inquiry/Request for Commentt (sic)
Body: Hello! My name is Autumn Wright, I'm a freelance games journalist. I had a few questions about sales of your games now that the studio is independent and the publisher for SoM has changed on Steam. 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? Appreciate your help!
I received no reply.
I followed up twice in the 24 hours since I first emailed Compulsion, and I sent a fourth email separately in case my subject line typo was filtering out my request. There are certainly other methods of fact-checking the claims made by Kotaku, GameSpot, and IGN, but 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. While I cannot confirm if Microsoft and Xbox are still publishing South of Midnight or whether the company sees profit from sales of the game on any platforms or not, my hope in publishing this blog is that someone who has a bigger name than me in this space or who works for an outlet with more (any) resources and some influence can verify whether Xbox profits from sales of South of Midnight, rather than making an inference.