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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top GOTY candidate, it’s also an enormous financial hit. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s even with its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as a surprise to the developers. I was convinced that we would have a solid title that would meet moderate market performance,” the COO and producer explained.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out the game's review aggregate, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps “maybe the biggest shock to the studio relative to “our initial expectations and the final result proved to be. Once it was published all staff members celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

The positive reception resulted in Sandfall developing new free content for the title featuring fresh areas, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, as announced is coming in the next few months.

That said, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. Our team includes an excellent group guided by a visionary director with a clear direction for the project and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the human scale that worked for this game and do maybe major titles sequentially,” the producer said.

The studio's scale drummed up plenty of debate when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, viewed the development group as the model for game development. Although the team is and was truly compact versus large developers, checking Expedition 33’s credits indicates many individuals participated; the French studio contracted a Korean team for animation work, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit slightly more definitely if we have an increase in development down the line,” the executive said. “However, I envision more of a workshop with a small number of highly skilled individuals capable of producing a work of art together.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as developers “aims to keep the key advantages that enabled this success from the start.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — believe me, efforts were made — the developers understand their essential identity. “Strategic combat, is integral to our identity of what we built,” they explained. “It's still premature to specify future passions, yet we must to remain faithful to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

The developer noted how this game began with the creative director developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we will be able to do as well for future productions.”