🔗 Share this article

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive Game of the Year candidate, but also a massive financial hit. Studio the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title topped 5 million units sold, and that’s despite it being a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as a shock to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game achieving reasonable sales results,” a key executive commented.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out that Clair Obscur’s review aggregate, now standing at 93, came as perhaps “maybe the biggest shock for everyone versus “our initial expectations and the actual outcome proved to be. When the score released everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

The positive reception resulted in Sandfall developing a free update for the title featuring fresh areas, enemies, plus epic encounters, as announced is coming sometime soon.

However, as the title expands, don’t expect the team will expand. “We have a great team guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for our work and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that made this possible and do maybe large projects one by one,” the producer said.

Their team size generated a storm of discussion upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at this studio as the model for creative teams. Although the team is and was indeed a small team next to major studios, a quick look at the title's staff list shows that dozens of people worked on it; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“Some hiring will occur a little more for sure should there be next an upcoming production peak down the line,” the executive said. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier of a few highly skilled individuals that create a work of art together.” It was stated that their core belief as a studio “is more to maintain the strengths that led to this accomplishment in the first place.”

While it may be premature for the studio to say specifically about future projects — and trust me, I attempted to learn more — they are certain what’s at its core. “Turn-based gameplay, forms the foundation of this project,” a developer explained. “It's still premature to announce what will interest us, but it's important also to stay true to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

The developer noted how this game originated from the creative director pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that philosophy will be repeated in coming projects.”