It's nice when studios get a chance to spin out independent rather than be shut down entirely

With larger companies doing evil shit on a regular basis and the workers getting inevitably fucked by that, it's nice when there are stories that take a somewhat different route! Coming off a report from Gamesbeat, Compulsion games is officially splitting off from Microsoft and regaining control over their IP.

This means a lot of things but most notably, that the 2025 southern gothic third-person adventure South of Midnight will be free of the BDS boycott and I'm really interested to finally give it a fair spin!

I was given a pre-release code leading up to the April 8th 2025 launch and when the BDS boycott of Microsoft's involvement in Palestinian genocide was formally announced on April 3rd, I stopped playing it. What I'd experienced so far was great¹ and I knew if I continued, it would make me wanna talk (and write) about it and that would directly be at odds with supporting the movement - so I uninstalled, hid it from my library and went on with my life. Now that its independent, I'm gonna buy a new copy to support the studio.

That said, the recent independence probably comes with its own pitfalls; I don't know if Compulsion will follow with what Double Fine (now also free of Microsoft) had to do (layoff nearly half its staff to retain operations), but if the studio can operate independently in any capacity that's better than what happened with Night School when Netflix started to "divest" from games; the Oxenfree creators were shut down entirely with everyone being out of a job.

And like, who knows where the money actually is in all of this. In many cases, these studios had larger corporate funds behind them which is the toss-up, right? Parent company covers certain finances and you're expected to make a thing that sells (and then when it sells successfully and / or wins awards your parent company can fuck you over anyway, wheeee) but once the parent company resources go away, how do you survive? That's sort of one of the major issues with the whole SpryFox situation right now where the Netflix money is gone and so "go full ham on Claude to keep making our MMO" gets floated into the equation and it's a fucking mess.

I want the best for the workers at every developer, even if they are still part of a corporate giant (and even if that giant is Microsoft who I'm treating as radioactive until they back off on Israeli military support at the very least, there's the whole AI thing that still has to be contended with). The last few years have seen so much institutional talent and knowledge just vanish from studio closures and destruction of the industry by shareholder whims. Hell, the Gaming Layoffs tracker has at least 700 layoffs tracked since July. And there are four companies listed in that window that don't have tracked numbers so it's probably a lot higher.

Organization is great and a correct thing to do if you can make it work, but it's also simultaneously discouraging because workers who've had the chance to unionze are often targeted first for layoffs even divorced from the "do we keep this studio in our portfolio or not?" conversations.

I don't wanna spiral too much at the end here, this is a blog post that's more stream of consciousness rather than anything structured and I don't wanna take away from the good news at the opening. Maybe it's time to cut to the end-of-post cat, yea?

His name is Mastodon and he's convinced the reflections my camera lens makes on the wall is the fae, and he desperately wants to hunt them to extinction.

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