🔗 Share this article

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY contender, it’s also a huge financial hit. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title surpassed five million copies in sales, this is in spite of it being a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

This achievement came as an unexpected turn to Sandfall. I was convinced that we would have a good game achieving some average sales results,” a senior team member explained.

The CTO and lead programmer noted the game's Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the studio relative to “our initial expectations and the final result turned out to be. Because when it dropped the entire team was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

That success has led to Sandfall developing a free update for the game including novel settings, enemies, and boss fights, as announced is coming sometime soon.

That said, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. Our team includes an excellent group under clear creative leadership with a clear direction for our work plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that made this possible and do maybe major titles sequentially,” the producer added.

The size of Sandfall drummed up significant conversation following launch. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, viewed the development group as the model for game development. Although the team is and was truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the game's credits shows that many individuals worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We plan to recruit a little more certainly should there be a future production surge down the line,” they stated. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier comprising a handful highly skilled individuals that create a work of art together.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as developers “focuses on preserving the key advantages that enabled this success in the first place.”

While it may be not the right time to say specifically what’s next — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer remarked. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell what will interest us, yet we must to adhere to our studio's essence through compelling worlds plus innovative play that drives our passion.”

The lead programmer added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with their director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that's something will be repeated in coming projects.”