🔗 Share this article

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year contender, but also a massive sales triumph. Studio the development team along with publisher their publishing partner announced that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as a shock for the team. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a solid title garnering moderate market performance,” the COO and producer stated.

Another leading developer remarked this title's critical score, which currently sits at 93, came as the most surprising moment to the studio versus our early predictions and what the reality proved to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. It was really frantic.”

That success has led to work on a free update for the game including novel settings, foes, and boss fights, as announced would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

However, while the game is growing, it's unlikely the studio to grow. “We have an excellent group guided by a visionary director with a clear direction for the project and future concepts. We'd like to keep the small-team dynamic that led to our success and do maybe one big game after another,” the producer noted.

The studio's scale drummed up plenty of debate following launch. Some developers, such as the famed director, viewed the development group as the “ideal” for a studio. Although the team is and was indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits reveals numerous contributors were involved; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit slightly more definitely if we have an increase in development in the coming years,” they commented. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals that create artistic collaborations.” It was stated that Sandfall’s vision as a studio “is more to maintain the key advantages that enabled this success originally.”

Despite being not the right time to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the team does know what’s at its core. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” they said. “It's a bit too early to specify what will interest us, however, it's crucial to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that inspires the team.”

The developer mentioned how this game started with the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that philosophy we will be able to do with upcoming games.”