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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year contender, it’s also a huge commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive along with publisher Kepler Interactive announced that this title exceeded five million copies sold, and that’s even with its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement came as quite a surprise to the developers. I was convinced that we would have a good game garnering reasonable market performance,” a key executive stated.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out the game's critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as the most surprising moment to the studio relative to “our initial expectations and the final result of the field was. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. The energy was electric.”

This triumph prompted Sandfall developing a free update for the title with a new environment, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out sometime soon.

However, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate the team will expand. We've built a talented crew with a strong creative director who has a great vision for our work and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that led to our success then develop large projects one by one,” the producer added.

The studio's scale sparked significant conversation when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at this studio as the “ideal” for creative teams. Although the team is and was relatively lean next to major studios, checking the game's credits reveals many individuals participated; the French studio contracted a Korean team for animation work, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more for sure if we have an increase in development in upcoming years,” they stated. “But I would see rather a creative atelier of a few highly skilled individuals that can make artistic collaborations.” He noted that their core belief as developers “aims to keep the successful elements that made this achievement possible originally.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans about future projects — believe me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” the lead programmer said. “The timing isn't right to specify our next interests, yet we must to stay true to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling and engaging mechanics that drives our passion.”

They mentioned how this game started with the creative director developing his passion title. And hopefully that's something we can continue with upcoming games.”