South of Midnight cracked the top 10 list of the most-played games in the US during its launch week, according to Circana’s executive director and video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella.
Piscatella reported the list of the top 15 games in terms of player engagement for the week of April 12, 2025, which is the week that South of Midnight officially launched. The top 10, even top 15 games regarding player engagement, are usually a very predictable list.
Just think of the most popular live service titles; you’ll see most of them on the list. So, for a brand-new single-player game, not based on any existing series, to crack the top 10 is a strong showing.
It didn’t crack the top sales list, but with South of Midnight launching into Xbox Game Pass, player engagement was always going to be the more important metric to look at. For Compulsion Games, it’s great that so many players were willing to take a chance on South of Midnight and check it out.
The rest of the list includes Marvel Rivals, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, Grand Theft Auto V, EA Sports College Football 25, NBA 2K25 and Rainbow Six Siege. All of them are major live service titles you’ll commonly see on lists tracking player engagement.
Of the top 15, the only other single-player game included is Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which came in at number 11, while South of Midnight eked into the top 10 at number 9.
It’ll be interesting to see how Xbox responds now, because Hi-Fi Rush also launched with strong engagement and positive responses from players and critics. Tango Gameworks was still shuttered by Xbox before being brought back to life by Krafton. Hopefully, Compulsion will continue to get strong support from Xbox instead of suffering the same fate as Tango.
