Compulsion Games Wins Six at Canadian Game Awards, Including Game of the Year
Compulsion Games turned the 2026 canadian game awards into a six-win night on Thursday, with South of Midnight taking Game of the Year at Toronto’s John W. H. Bassett Theatre. The Montreal studio also picked up Studio of the Year, giving the event one clear winner and one clear national industry signal.
South of Midnight in Toronto
Six awards went to South of Midnight: Game of the Year, Best Console Game, Best Art Direction, Best Audio Design, Best Score/Soundtrack, and Best Narrative. The game launched in April 2025 for Windows PC and Xbox Series S/X before later arriving on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, so the awards arrived after its release window had already widened across platforms.
That spread matters because the Canadian Game Awards were built to celebrate Canadian game development, and this year’s show put a Montreal studio at the center of a worldwide stream on YouTube and Twitch. South of Midnight was developed in Montreal, even though the game itself is set in a fictionalized American Deep South.
Compulsion Games and Studio of the Year
Compulsion Games also won Studio of the Year, which paired the game’s individual wins with institutional recognition for the team behind it. Carl-Edwin Michel, who conceived and created the awards, has said, “Canadian games have a big impact not just here in Canada but the rest of the world,” and “and so we need to celebrate this amazing talent doing amazing things.”
Michel also said, “We have awards like the Junos for music and Canadian Screen Awards for film, TV, and other media, and so we should also be honouring the creators behind our massive entertainment medium.” That is the logic behind a national event that handed out major prizes beyond one title, with Hell Is Us taking Best Game Design and Best Performance for Montreal-born actor Elias Toufexis, Battlefield Studios’ Battlefield 6 winning Best PC Game, and Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Mobile winning Best Mobile Game.
Canadian Game Awards Winners
Wanderstop won Best Indie Game, Games by Stitch won Best VR/AR Game for Elsewhere Electric, and Ubisoft Quebec’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows received the Innovation in Accessibility nod, presented by blind gamer and accessibility advocate Steve Saylor. Victor Lucas won Best Content Creator and received the inaugural Game Changer Award, rounding out a night that spread recognition across publishers, indies, accessibility work, and creators.
For Compulsion, the result puts a Montreal studio in the same frame as the industry’s larger publishers while giving South of Midnight a clean awards-season credential set: top game, top studio, and four craft wins. After a Thursday-night sweep in Toronto, the conversation now shifts from whether the game landed to how broadly it was recognized across the voting categories.
