🔗 Share this article

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong Game of the Year candidate, it’s also an enormous commercial success. Developer the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive disclosed that this title topped 5 million units in sales, and that’s even with its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance was a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we would have a good game garnering some average sales results,” a senior team member explained.

A technical director noted that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, was the most surprising moment to the studio versus what we anticipated and what the reality turned out to be. When the score released the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

This triumph has led to the studio creating new free content for the game featuring fresh areas, foes, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out in the next few months.

Nevertheless, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. “We have a talented crew under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for this game plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the human scale that led to our success then develop one big game after another,” the producer noted.

The size of Sandfall drummed up plenty of debate upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, considered this studio as the “ideal” for game development. Although the team is and was relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, checking Expedition 33’s credits reveals dozens of people worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea handling movement and effects, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely when facing a future production surge down the line,” they stated. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio of a few really talented people that can make a work of art together.” He noted that the studio's philosophy as developers “aims to keep the key advantages that enabled this success in the first place.”

Although it's not the right time to say specifically what’s next — believe me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” a developer explained. “It's still premature to be able to tell what will interest us, yet we must to adhere to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling and engaging mechanics that inspires the team.”

The lead programmer added that the project began with the visionary developing his passion title. And hopefully that's something will be repeated with upcoming games.”