Xbox is reportedly shutting down Compulsion Games.
The studio, which was founded in 2009 and acquired by Xbox in 2018, most recently developed South of Midnight.
According to Kotaku, however, the studio is set to be shut down.
The publication notes that two months ago Compulsion’s talent lead Joe Palin was advertising on LinkedIn for programmers for “a fascinating, intriguing, brand new IP”, the fate of which is now no longer certain.
Concerns arose last week that Xbox was planning another round of layoffs, after Xbox CEO Asha Sharma stated during a Bloomberg Tech conference that she planned on “resetting the business” because it was “not in a healthy spot”.
In an email to employees last week which was later published on the official Xbox Wire blog, Sharma wrote that the Xbox business had declined to a 3% “accountability margin,” which is the metric Microsoft uses to track its profit margin.
“Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time,” she wrote. “Going forward, this cannot continue.”
Compulsion Games released Contrast in 2013, and followed this up with We Happy Few in 2018. In June 2018, two months before the release of We Happy Few, Xbox announced that Compulsion was one of five studios it had acquired, along with Undead Labs, Playground Games, Ninja Theory and the newly-created The Initiative.
The Initiative was closed down in 2025, as part of another round of layoffs by Microsoft.
More to follow…
News#Xbox #reportedly #shutting #South #Midnight #studio #Compulsion #Games1781542008
