Multiple employees at Compulsion Games, the Montreal-based studio behind We Happy Few and South of Midnight, are publicly looking for new jobs, according to a PC Gamer report — a signal of internal uncertainty even though the studio has announced no formal layoffs.

The report's framing — "it's not layoffs, but you can see them from here" — captures the situation: no reduction in force has been confirmed, but the volume of developers actively seeking their next role suggests the studio's staffing situation is shifting beneath the surface.

Compulsion Games has been owned by Microsoft since 2018, when the company acquired the studio as part of its broader push to build out Xbox Game Studios. The studio most recently shipped South of Midnight, an action-adventure title set in the American Deep South, which released in April 2025.

For a first-party studio, a wave of employees posting openly about their job searches typically precedes one of several outcomes: a quiet headcount reduction through non-renewed contracts, a restructuring after a project milestone, or a gap between shipped titles with no confirmed follow-up in full production. None of these has been confirmed for Compulsion at the time of writing.

What this means practically for the teams involved is a period of ambiguity. Developers job hunting while still employed often face limited internal mobility if the studio's next project has not been greenlit at scale, and Montreal's game development labor market — home to Ubisoft's largest studios as well as a wide field of independents — is itself under pressure from industry-wide cuts.

Compulsion has not publicly commented on the situation, and Microsoft has not announced any staffing changes specific to the studio.

The context matters. The games industry has shed tens of thousands of jobs since 2023, and even studios under the Xbox first-party umbrella have not been insulated — Microsoft has implemented cuts across its gaming divisions in multiple rounds, including reductions that touched Bethesda and Activision Blizzard after the $68.7 billion acquisition closed in 2023.

Against that backdrop, clusters of public job searches at a first-party studio tend to be read by industry observers as an early indicator rather than a coincidence.

Watch for two concrete signals in the coming weeks: whether Compulsion or Microsoft issues a formal statement on headcount, and whether the studio announces its next project — the absence of either would itself be telling.