🔗 Share this article

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year candidate, it’s also a massive sales triumph. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner disclosed that the game topped 5 million units sold, this is in spite of it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance was a shock to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we would have a solid title garnering some average sales results,” the COO and producer commented.

Another leading developer pointed out the game's Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the team relative to what we anticipated and the actual outcome of the field was. Once it was published everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

That success has led to Sandfall developing a free update for players featuring fresh areas, enemies, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out sometime soon.

However, while the game is growing, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. We've built an excellent group guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for this game plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the human scale that made this possible and do maybe large projects one by one,” the executive noted.

The size of Sandfall drummed up a storm of discussion when the game came out. A few well-known creators, including renowned designers, looked at this studio as the model for a studio. Although the team is and was indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the game's credits shows that dozens of people worked on it; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators handling movement and effects, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit a bit more for sure when facing a future production surge in the coming years,” they said. “But I would see rather a creative atelier of a few exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” He noted that the studio's philosophy as developers “aims to keep the strengths that made this achievement possible originally.”

Although it's premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans what’s next — rest assured, efforts were made — the team does know their fundamental principles. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” the lead programmer remarked. “It's still premature to specify future passions, however, it's crucial to adhere to the DNA of studio through compelling worlds and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

They noted that the project began with the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that philosophy we will be able to do with upcoming games.”