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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year candidate, it’s also a huge commercial success. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title topped five million copies in sales, and that’s despite its status as a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

This achievement came as quite a shock for the team. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game garnering some average commercial success,” a senior team member stated.

A technical director remarked that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, was the most surprising moment to the studio relative to “our initial expectations and the actual outcome of the field was. Once it was published all staff members were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph prompted the studio creating new free content for players including novel settings, enemies, along with challenging bosses, as announced would be out sometime soon.

That said, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the studio to grow. Our team includes an excellent group with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for our work plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the small-team dynamic that made this possible then develop major titles sequentially,” the producer said.

The studio's scale generated plenty of debate upon the title's release. Some developers, such as the famed director, looked at Sandfall’s team as the model for a studio. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean versus large developers, checking the game's credits reveals numerous contributors participated; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators for animation work, to illustrate.

“We will hire slightly more certainly when facing next an upcoming production peak down the line,” the executive stated. “Yet I picture more of a workshop of a few really talented people that can make collective masterpieces.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a company “focuses on preserving the key advantages that made this achievement possible originally.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details what’s next — and trust me, I tried to get them to — they are certain their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to be able to tell what will interest us, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

They mentioned how this game originated from the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. It is hoped this approach we can continue in coming projects.”