🔗 Share this article

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year candidate, it’s also an enormous financial hit. Studio the development team along with publisher their publishing partner announced that the game topped five million copies in sales, this is even with it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite a surprise to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we would have an enjoyable experience garnering some average sales results,” the COO and producer explained.

A technical director 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 actual outcome proved to be. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

That success resulted in the studio creating a free update for players including novel settings, enemies, along with challenging bosses, as announced is coming within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate the team will expand. We've built an excellent group guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for our work and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the small-team dynamic that worked for this game then develop large projects one by one,” the producer said.

Their team size sparked a storm of discussion when the game came out. A few well-known creators, including renowned designers, looked at the development group as a perfect example for game development. Despite being indeed a small team next to major studios, checking Expedition 33’s credits shows that many individuals were involved; Sandfall contracted a Korean team for animation work, for example.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more for sure if we have next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” they said. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio comprising a handful highly skilled individuals that create a work of art together.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as developers “aims to keep the strengths that enabled this success in the first place.”

While it may be premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans regarding upcoming titles — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of what we built,” a developer explained. “It's still premature to be able to tell future passions, but it's important also to stay true to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The developer added how this game began with the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that's something will be repeated in coming projects.”