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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top GOTY candidate, it’s also an enormous commercial success. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner disclosed that this title exceeded 5 million units sold, and that’s despite it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite an unexpected turn to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a good game garnering reasonable sales results,” a key executive stated.

A technical director noted that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the studio relative to our early predictions and the actual outcome proved to be. Once it was published all staff members was screaming and jumping. The energy was electric.”

That success resulted in the studio creating a free update for the title with a new environment, foes, and boss fights, which they said would be out in the next few months.

However, while the game is growing, it's unlikely they'll hire extensively. Our team includes a talented crew guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for this game and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that worked for this game then develop large projects one by one,” the producer said.

The studio's scale generated significant conversation following launch. Some developers, including renowned designers, considered the development group as the “ideal” for creative teams. Although the team is and was truly compact versus large developers, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits reveals numerous contributors were involved; the French studio partnered with overseas animators to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“Some hiring will occur a little more definitely should there be a future production surge in the coming years,” the executive said. “But I would see more of a workshop comprising a handful really talented people that can make a work of art together.” It was stated that their core belief as a studio “is more to maintain the successful elements that enabled this success originally.”

Although it's not the right time to say specifically about future projects — believe me, I attempted to learn more — the developers understand their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer explained. “It's a bit too early to announce future passions, yet we must to stay true to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

They noted that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the creative director developing his passion title. And hopefully that's something we can continue with upcoming games.”